Bloggers: SOPA, PIPA Will be the End of the Blogosphere

Bloggers of all stripes and political persuasions are joining together to oppose SOPA and Protect IP, with some telling political publications like Politico that the passage of these bills will be the end of the blogosphere as we know it.

"If either the U.S. Senate’s Protect IP Act (PIPA) & the U.S. House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) become law, political blogs such as Red Mass Group [conservative] & Blue Mass Group [liberal] will cease to exist," wrote a blogger at Red Mass Group.

Some bloggers have said that the bills could criminalize pages and blogs that link to foreign websites dedicated to online piracy.

“Of course, restrictions of results provided by Internet search engines amount to just that: prior restraint of their free expression of future results. Google and others, under SOPA, are told what they can or can’t publish before they publish it. Kill. The. Bill,” conservative blogger Neil Stevens argued at RedState.

Liberals blogs are pointing out that corporate support for the bills is waning - or at least feeling the heat for their positions. Many point to GoDaddy as an example of the cause and effect of supporting these measures.

“Some good news on the SOPA front: Its corporate base of supporters is starting to crumble,” David Dayden wrote at Firedoglake. “GoDaddy is not alone. Scores of law firms are requesting their names be removed from the Judiciary Committee’s official list of SOPA supporters.”

“The dynamic is clear. Once SOPA — and its Senate counterpart, Protecting IP Act, or PIPA — became high-profile among the Internet community, the lazy endorsements from companies and various hangers-on became toxic. And now, those supporters are scrambling, hollowing out the actual support for the bill. Suddenly, a bill with ‘widespread’ corporate support doesn’t have much support at all,” Dayden added.

Conservatives are taking a different approach, promising to make sacrifices of republicans that support either of these bills. Blogger Erick Erickson said that he would encourage a tough primary for any Republican who supports the bill.

“I love Marsha Blackburn. She is a delightful lady and a solidly conservative member of Congress. And I am pledging right now that I will do everything in my power to defeat her in her 2012 reelection bid” due to her co-sponsorship for SOPA, Erickson wrote at RedState. “Congress has proven it does not understand the Internet. Perhaps they will understand brute strength against them at the ballot box. If members of Congress do not pull their name from co-sponsorship of SOPA, the left and right should pledge to defeat each and every one of them.”

Lawmakers think that they can take control of the Internet but when they return to their district and look for votes they may find that SOPA and Protect IP will be their undoing on election day.

Source: Politico