If you happened to get on Google on January 18^th, 2012, you may have noticed the logo had been covered by a large black bar - a show of censorship. If you attempted to get on Wikipedia, it disallowed access to its English edition.  Google and Wikipedia – along with many other sites – were “blacking out” in protest of two bills in the United States Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA). These pieces of legislature were claiming to attempt to put a stop to piracy, but in truth, they would do much more than that.

            Some would agree that SOPA was the worse bill. Under SOPA law, those who merely streamed a video that contained copyrighted material, such as yourself covering a song, could land the uploader up to five years in prison. SOPA would also disallow search engines from linking to the site of which copyrighted information would be found and would require Internet service providers to block access to them using the same censorship methods in use in Syria, Iran, China, and North Korea. Under SOPA, sites like YouTube, SoundCloud, and many others would never survive. PIPA would allow media giants - like UniversalMusic or Viacom – or other right holders to take actionand would cut funding to infringing sites, giving the larger firms a grip on the internet and not allowing competition to grow. However, after the protest of the websites, support for both bills changed drastically.

These bills would also tamper with the inner-workings of the Internet, making it less stable and possibly less secure.  SOPA and PIPA were “shelved”; it’s safe to say that these bills have been all but entirely defeated, but this is only the beginning of a larger problem.

            Currently, the Internet is under a global threat from legislature in many nations and from international deals as well. For one, there exists the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), an international treaty drafted entirely in secret in 2006; the information on the treaty was leaked by WikiLeaks. This treaty covers more than just piracy of software and intellectual property, and requires that Internet service providers log your actions on the internet. The United States has already signed ACTA, and the European Union has signed it recently. On another front, there is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a free trade agreement with controversial intellectual property laws included – also negotiated in secret.

            Already had enough? Well, there’s more…

            House Resolution 1981 – also known as the Protect Children From Internet Pornographers Act, sounds great to those going only by the title. The bill doesn’t really contain any Internet censorship laws, but will require Internet service providers to track and keep logs of your movements across the web for at least eighteen months.

And now, there is new legislation before Congress being drafted in secrecy. It is supposedly a bill quite like SOPA that senators are trying to push through the Senate under the guise of being a cyber-security law. What is frightening about this bill is that it may also contain an option that a failed bill contained quite a while ago: the option for the president to declare an “emergency of cyber security” and completely shut down the Internet.

We were able to take actions against SOPA and PIPA. Many of us signed petitions and called our representatives and senators urging them to vote against. You can help fight by signing petitions against legislature like this, assuming petitions have effect (https://secure.avaaz.org/en/stop_acta/ is where a global petition against ACTA is found). In the worst case scenario, enjoy the Internet while it lasts. Soon it may not be the same.