In what ways could the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) affect the way people use the Internet?
“Goodbye, Cydia. Goodbye, Wikileaks. Goodbye, textfiles.com. Goodbye, abandonware sites.” -Steven Hugg
Youtube would have been blacklisted in the first month if this law was in effect 10 years ago.
Basicly, you can expect that new and controversial services will be blacklisted along with several very popular existing services. It will certainly have a chilling effect.
This law hands over control to what you can access on the internet to the government and corporate interests. No one argues that its not a tool of censorship, they are only debating whether the censorship is desirable or undesirable.
However, I think this bill could be the best thing that happens to the internet. The backlash would be immense. Will will rely less on government controlled services such as DNS. In Japan, measures similar to COICA sparked the development of extremely sophisticated cryptographic file exchange systems. A major erosion of internet freedom such as COICA could create demand in the United States for most robust internet infrastructure.
Ironically, the FBI and NSA have been the strongest opponents of these blacklist bills in the past, because they were afraid it would drive people to use cryptographic products and communication protocols that were difficult to intercept and monitor. However, the COICA provisions are being pushed through with a tacit agreement that they would be accompanied by the outlawing of encryption services where end-users have control of their private keys. If encryption without government backdoors is made illegal and enforced (throwing people in jail for using encrypted file sharing services), then COICA may be enforceable.
The COICA bill is only politically feasible with government mandated back-doors in all encryption products and services.
The New York Times reported today that the FBI is preparing to propose legislation to the Obama Administration that would require Internet service providers (including software makers like Skype) to build in “backdoors” so that any communication between people can be monitored by the government.
COICA eliminates the possibility of operating innovative new services which skirt the line on copyrights. New services will not occur in the open and the existing services will be pushed to adapt technical measures to circumvent these regulations.
COICA will have the most impact on new internet services and emerging business models (like Youtube) but will have very little impact on curtailing existing copyright abuses, which will simply move to adapt more advanced technical measures, as has already happened in Japan