The other day I marveled at the ease with which the internet biggies brought down SOPA and PIPA in a post that ended with this, "... it makes one wonder what else an organized effort by websites could do. Hopefully, their efforts will be directed toward freedom and liberty not regulation and restraint."
Today Aaron Ross Powell makes an excellent point about how the skepticism the tech community exhibited toward SOPA/PIPA should be applied to all proposed legislation. See The Lesson the Tech Community Should Have Learned from SOPA. His point is that the tech community's opinion about SOPA/PIPA was based on their expertise in their field. But proposed laws about subjects out of their field of expertise may be just as destructive, they just don't know it.
It’s true that proponents of state power often have well-polished pitches for why their favored program will work. Yet we usually lack the knowledge to fully evaluate their claims. ...
This ignorance—which we all suffer, for there is just too much for any one person to know—forces us to either accept at face value what our legislators tell us or to adopt a general attitude of skepticism. ...
One hopes that next time a nice-sounding bill comes along (something like the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act), those millions of geeks who applied their expert knowledge to SOPA and found it wanting will look past the name, will recognize their own ignorance about the particular policy area, and will instead evince a heavy dose of libertarian skepticism. SOPA was not the exception to the rule. Instead, it was just how things are done in Washington.
With so much more access now to what lawmakers are up to, and with all the ways voters now have to communicate through the internet then maybe, just maybe, voters themselves can exert a little bit more control over the people who are supposed to be representing them.
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