M-Lab Opposes SOPA/PIPA

Measurement Lab joins millions in the tech community and beyond in opposing SOPA/PIPA, two bills before Congress that would require Internet infrastructure providers (including application providers) to censor the web. Some provisions have technical flaws that threaten the Net's fundamental architecture that allows the Internet to function as an engine for innovation and change. These bills are intended to fight online piracy and illegal online content. We laud these goals, but SOPA/PIPA miss their mark.

By advocating this type of enforcement, SOPA/PIPA effectively couple the incentive to break content laws with the incentive to break technology. As circumvention and other methods to avoid detection become commonplace, we will see the deterioration of the universality of the Internet as a shared and global system that has fostered extraordinary application development and access to information. SOPA/PIPA indirectly promote an erosion of the technical principles that govern a single, unified Internet. M-LAB is focused on improving the performance of this fertile infrastructure and shares the views espoused by others in the technical community as evidenced by the references below.

• A statement from the Internet Society (ISOC) advancing their opposition to SOPA/PIPA, specifically illuminating the issues with DNS filtering, is available here.
• The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) released a statement opposing SOPA/PIPA, focusing particularly on the potential harm to DNS.
• A good overview of the harms of SOPA/PIPA is available here.
• We encourage you to add your voice to the growing tide of citizens opposing censorship and supporting a healthy, innovative Internet.