SOPA won’t work.

If America accepts SOPA then some of persons, maybe… a few hundreds of persons? … would get even richer and happy because we would be forced to pay them, right, great! Yes, that is good for … 0,000001% of the world… and bad for the other 99,99999%. Mmmmm… I think it is not a good deal.

As a software developer and writer I certainly understand the need to protect intellectual property rights, but the means by which we do so has to be balanced against effectiveness, cost, and fundamental human rights.

Kevin has it exactly right: DNS works by mutual consent. Any attempts to enforce changes without that consent risk causing the collapse of the system. Notably, there are *already* browser plugins available that will circumvent the SOPA measures.

SOPA will not be effective, and is likely to cause considerable collateral damage. It’s bad legislation from every angle.

Don’t let politicians that know nothing about how the internet works break it. They dont understand how much of an impact it would be for the hosting business in the US.

Keep up the fight never give up.

Given the finite resource of IPv4 space, more and more sites will share single IPv4 addresses, making it impossible to take blanket action on a single IP (considering the collateral damage it would cause to hundreds – if not thousands – of legitimate sites).

The hurdles that are being put up for “infringing site” owners and users are just hurdles, not security fences. The biggest worry is that the bad guys will (relatively easily) find a way to circumvent the actions required by the bill, and the only people affected will be good guys who fall victim to bad guys who take advantage of the legislation and use it to their own gain.

And “If a site is reported to be an infringing site, service providers have to do everything in their power to prevent users from getting there.”

With the Post-SOPA URL request/ Page retrieval process you describe, all an individual who wanted to visit the infringing Softlayer.com site would need to do is enter the raw IP address, bypassing the DNS retrieval step.

But “everything in their power” could be construed to mean something as complicated as detecting the entry of an IP adress (instead of a URL) and then using a reverse DNS to determine that the user was attempting to reach an infringing site, and blocking the subsequent… or something as simple as doing a periodic DNS lookup of each infringing site on record and blocking all packets originating from those IPs.

Of course, even those methods can be bypassed, and the effect would likely be to create a black market for the workarounds themselves, either as client software or remote services like VPN or even IP reverse-spoofing…

All in all it’s a farce, and will do nothing but cost governments and ISPs money.