Communications of the ACM
Internet Pioneers Protest Senate Anti-Piracy Bill
Some of the rock stars of Internet engineering (yes, they exist) on Tuesday protested a Senate bill aimed at fighting online piracy, saying the legislation could lead to censorship and destabilize the architecture of the Web.
In their letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the 89 engineers said a bill proposed by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) that would block the domain names for sites that engage in piracy and copyright infringement threatens to cause far-reaching harm.
Specifically, early Internet systems creator David Reed and others said the bill could destabilize the domain name system used as an underlying infrastructure for the Web. The engineers said the measure could wipe out entire domain names, which are used to translate sites like www.washingtonpost.com into the Internet addresses used by computers to communicate with each other.
From The Washington Post
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