I am quite confused about politics at present. In the old days there were Labour (working class) and Tories (middle and upper classes). The policies of Labour became Tory, and Tory became Labour to some degree over the last 20 years.

And so now there is SOPA. A ban on free speech on the net by politicians. It seems quite censorial at first.

However playing the devil`s advocate, I find some articles on the net are misleading and sometimes harmful. As I am confused with the political parties I am confused about SOPA.

Could SOPA in fact lead to a more "civilised" and "responsible" net? My knee-jerk response is who needs restrictions.

However as I see some sites on the net which were probably not anticipated when the net started I do wonder.

And so the question is - could SOPA be beneficial?

I certainly don't know everything SOPA entails but I wasn't under the impression it is an attack on freedom of speech. You would be able to continue to say anything you want, as long as it isn't copyrighted material. This would mean essentially forcing ISP's to disable DNS service for a website that possibly hosts copyrighted material (youtube, reddit, for example). You'd still be able to access the website if you knew the site's IP address but since many wont, the traffic of said site would dwindle to near nothing, very quickly.

There's probably a lot more to it as well, as I'm sure the act is pretty lengthy. This is just the impressions I've got from SOPA after various skimming of articles.

*EDIT* Oh and also to answer the question, SOPA would definitely make the web a boring, commercialized format of advertising. It may actually be lucrative to some business or artists but that too is debatable. Piracy has been shown to increase sales in the past on many occasions.

With SOPA, you're probably going to want to have your debit / credit card out on hand whenever you browse the internet.

The net is fine the way it its. SOPA only helps the media industry, and can only hurt others via collateral damage.

To answer your question: no.

sopa would benefit the corporations that back the politicians who are...backing sopa...oh yeah and the band metallica

Is the internet the property of America?

How would SOPA help the internet?

I think SOPA will be detrimental to policing the net.

Initially it will seem to be working but I suspect that P2P networks will boom and everyone will start using torrents as a primary source of information transfer.

From another viewpoint.....I think it is very possible that rouge DNS servers will start popping up in retaliation to SOPA/PIPA.