Internet Engineers, EFF Warn Against PIPA and SOPA

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Notable Internet engineers have submitted a letter to the US Congress on their contentions against the passage of the Protect-IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) passed a missive that received approvals and signatures from Internet pioneers Vinton Cerf, recognized as one of the fathers of the Internet; Paul Vixie, Internet protocol designer and author of BIND; and Jim Gettys, editor of the HTTP/1.1 specification in the Internet Engineering Task Force.

The geniuses are three of over fifty Internet pillars that now join the fight against SOPA.

The engineers’ written statement said, “We, the undersigned, have played various parts in building a network called the Internet. We wrote and debugged the software; we defined the standards and protocols that talk over that network. Many of us invented parts of it. We’re just a little proud of the social and economic benefits that our project, the Internet, has brought with it.

Last year, the EFF sent a proposal regarding censorship and COICA copyright legislations to the US Congress.

Now the organization is reiterating their worries in a follow-up letter re PIPA and SOPA, suggesting that these bills are more alarming than last year’s legislations.

According to the Internet innovators, if the bills will pass legislation, it will implement an envelope of dread over the Internet and impair the roots of its technological innovation, which will severely hurt the credibility of the US in its primary purpose as keeper of critical Internet infrastructure.

The letter continues that PIPA and SOPA will likely break the Domain Name System and trigger several off-the-wall “technical consequences” with an unwanted two-tiered Internet.

“Such legislation would engender censorship that will simultaneously be circumvented by deliberate infringers while hampering innocent parties’ right and ability to communicate and express themselves online,” the engineers add in the letter. “All censorship schemes impact speech beyond the category they were intended to restrict, but these bills are particularly egregious in that regard because they cause entire domains to vanish from the Web, not just infringing pages or files. Worse, an incredible range of useful, law-abiding sites can be blacklisted under these proposals.”

The gist of their letter of concern are more in-depth than what oppositions bring to PIPA and SOPA, warning that the US Congress that aims to lay down Internet censorship and compliance as design requirements for online software, a divergent action from when these engineers developed protocols and software.

Vinton Cerf, recognized as one of the fathers of the Internet, opposes PIPA and SOPA. Image: Sebastian Bassi / Flickr (CC)

The letter reminds the US government not to implement guidelines for which it picks apart other repressive governments, saying, “This can only damage the security of the network, and give authoritarian governments more power over what their citizens can read and publish.”

“The US government has regularly claimed that it supports a free and open Internet, both domestically and abroad. We cannot have a free and open Internet unless its naming and routing systems sit above the political concerns and objectives of any one government or industry,” warns the letter. “Senators, Congressmen, we believe the Internet is too important and too valuable to be endangered in this way, and implore you to put these bills aside.”