Opinion

Protecting Americans from Web scams

The Stop Online Piracy Act and its Senate counterpart, the Protect IP Act, are provoking a chorus of criticism from the so-called Internet freedom lobby — the people who insisted that “the Internet as we know it will soon come to an end” if Congress didn’t pass a “Net neutrality law” in 2006.

They now claim that SOPA will “break the Internet” by making it less secure, mounting viral marketing campaigns and boycotts against SOPA supporters. A humorous blog post by one Washington think tank rates the current “Internet hysteria index” the highest it’s ever been. The overreaction shows that critics don’t grasp the importance of the bills or what they really require.

SOPA targets foreign Web sites that sell counterfeit drugs and stolen copies of Hollywood movies — not such American Web sites as YouTube or your favorite blog.

Existing laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Pro-IP Act deal with American sites, but such laws don’t work against foreign thieves operating outside US jurisdiction. Internet criminals selling bogus drugs or pirated movies simply set up shop in China or a distant island republic, knowing that they won’t be harassed by law enforcement regardless of how many US lives or jobs they endanger.

SOPA deals with these foreign rogue Web sites by cutting off their money supply — forbidding credit-card companies to process payments to them and ad networks to place their ads.

This part of the bill is not controversial, and congressional SOPA critics have proposed an alternate bill, the OPEN Act, with similar provisions. But the OPEN approach only goes halfway. Rogue Web sites can simply switch banks or sell their own ads to escape enforcement. SOPA goes further, enlisting the help of US Internet service providers and search engines to prevent rogue sites from appearing side by side with legitimate pharmacies and movie stores in Internet searches.

If you search for “stream free movies” today, you’ll see links to rogue sites before legitimate ones. The rogue sites won’t actually offer movies for free, and some will even attempt to install viruses on your computer. But they can be stopped.

It’s actually easy to make the rogue sites disappear from the Internet, by changing the way they’re treated by the Internet’s directory service. The system, the Domain Name Service, known as DNS, translates names such as “thepiratebay.org” to Internet addresses such as “194.71.107.15.”

Just as a 411 operator won’t tell you an unlisted number, DNS can refuse to provide Internet addresses if it chooses. SOPA simply requires ISPs to delist the Internet addresses of foreign sites found by a US court to be dedicated to criminal activities. DNS has had the ability to delist sites since it was designed in 1987, and all widely used DNS services have this capability.

SOPA critics charge that such filtering breaks the Internet, but it does no such thing as long as it’s done sensibly. (Security experts criticized an early version of SOPA, but the amended bill addresses their concerns.) It’s a practical means of protecting consumers from rogue sites that traffic in illegal goods.

The opposition to SOPA preys on ignorance and fear. Most Internet users don’t understand the details of DNS or the methods used by Internet search engines. It’s easy for the apologists for the Internet status quo to convince the less well informed that the Internet is too big and complicated to improve. But they’re wrong. It’s hard for our slow-moving Congress to stay abreast of all the changes that take place on the Internet at breakneck speed.

But Internet crime is nothing new. SOPA is a careful and reasonable way of dealing with crime that won’t “break the Internet” or end democracy as we know it. It’s time to stop exploiting Internet ignorance and do something serious about Internet crime. Protecting Americans from bogus Web sites should be a government priority.

Richard Bennett is a senior research fellow at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation.