Category: Politics

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Imagine that a group of people who don’t drive much, don’t understand how cars work under the hood, and have never studied traffic engineering decide that they’re going to stop speeding by requiring that cars automatically slam on the emergency brake and lock the controls the moment they exceed the speed limit — or the moment someone reports that the car has exceeded the speed limit.

Note that I didn’t say anything about turning the engine off, or putting it in neutral. Or only doing so in places where the speed limit is properly posted. Or worrying about whether there’s a car behind them that will have to slam on their own breaks to prevent a pile-up. Or actually checking that the car really is speeding before acting on the report.

Now imagine that criticisms and objections raised by actual drivers, the auto industry, traffic engineers, highway planners, and city planners are all dismissed as speeder propaganda.

That’s basically what’s going on with the “anti-piracy” bills being discussed in the House (SOPA) and Senate (PIPA/Protect IP).

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After a list of companies publicly supporting SOPA (the censor-the-internet-in-the-name-of-stopping-piracy bill) went public last week, the complaints started rolling in…but the biggest target, at least in the circles that I frequent, was GoDaddy. People organized a boycott, transferred their business elsewhere, and GoDaddy eventually reversed course, but it was too late to stop a massive outflow of customers.

But why was GoDaddy such a target? And for that matter, why did so many people follow through, rather than just rant about it on the internet?

I think there are several reasons.

  1. The tech industry is mostly opposed to the bill on technical reasons. Pick a random hosting provider and chances are they’re officially against it. That made GoDaddy stand out in a way that a random movie studio doesn’t.
  2. They provide a service, not content, and there are many competitors who provide the same kind of service. (And it seems like they all came out with discount codes to encourage people to switch to their company.) With content, you can choose to read a book from another publisher, or watch a movie from another studio, but if you want to watch a particular movie, you can’t get it somewhere else. There are lots of comics publishers out there, but if you want to read Spider-Man, you can only get it from Marvel.
  3. Public opinion of GoDaddy was already low. For some it was their sexist ad campaigns. For some it was the CEO bragging about shooting elephants. For some it was their incessant email marketing, or focus on upselling unneeded services to people who didn’t understand what they were, or the fact that their website is such a %^$^@#%& pain to use. They’re cheap, and they’re well-known, which means a lot of people used them…but they weren’t that well-liked. Supporting SOPA ended up being the last straw.

As a result, you had a company that was tolerated at best painting a target on themselves, and a relatively easy way for people to vote with their wallets and not actually give anything up other than the time and money needed to make the transfer.

Full disclosure: I used to have about 10 domain names registered through GoDaddy, plus a few at DreamHost and one at Network Solutions. (Yes, Network Solutions.) GoDaddy was annoying, but cheap, and it was easier to renew than move. This week I consolidated them all at DreamHost, where I’ve had my websites hosted for the past year. DreamHost is offering a discount code for new customers who want to switch: SOPAROPA. I don’t get anything for telling you that, but if you sign up and list me (kelson – at – pobox – dot – com) as the person who referred you to DreamHost, I’ll get credits that I can apply to my hosting bill.

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If you live in the US and you use the Internet, you need to know about this. There are two proposed laws, SOPA and Protect IP, that would set up a system to block access to websites deemed to be “infringing,” in the name of stopping piracy. Of course, “infringing” could refer to the actions of one user on a large site, like, say, Facebook or Wikipedia. Imagine if someone at Warner Bros. filed a complaint about someone’s fan art on DeviantArt, and the government blocked access to the entire site. Sort of like shutting down an entire mall because one shopper was accused (not even proven!) of wearing a counterfeit Rolex.

Of course, once a system like this is in place, we all know it’ll never be abused, right?

And that’s not even getting into the technical implications of the bills, which would put an extra burden on tech startups and actually undermine efforts by the US government itself to make the internet more secure.

████, the ████ ████ █████ ██████ the ████████ ██████ the US in the ████ of ████████ ██████ (█████ it ██████’t), isn’t ████ yet. In ████, it’s █████ to a ████ ████ ████.

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Most cities in Orange County have banned the sale and setting off of fireworks to and by the general public for safety reasons. Of course, fireworks are an Independence Day tradition, so most cities also put on professional displays on the Fourth of July.

But a lot of people like the hands-on experience of setting off fireworks themselves. This leaves them with three choices:

  1. Go somewhere where setting off your own fireworks is legal.
  2. Shrug it off.
  3. Sneak around and hope you don’t get caught.

#1 is getting harder all the time as more cities clamp down on fireworks. #2, I imagine, is unsatisfying. #3 is stupid, because chances are pretty good that you’ll either get unsafe fireworks, or use them unsafely (because you’re trying to hide the fact that you’re setting off explosives), and end up burning someone, or burning their house down, or starting a 75-acre brush fire because you went out into the boonies in hopes that no one would catch you, but didn’t think about the fact that you were surrounded by dry grass.

So here’s my proposal:

If you’re going to ban fireworks, instead of banning them outright, set aside a designated area where people can set them off themselves.. Fairgrounds and/or large parking lots would be good for this. The Great Park, perhaps? Keep fire crews on standby. Limit the number of people so that you can evacuate safely if something goes wrong. Limit the types of fireworks people are allowed to bring in so that it’s hard for them to bring in homemade crap that’s more likely to blow off their hands than make a nice show.

It will never happen in today’s litigious society, of course. The first time someone broke the rules and someone else got hurt, people would start suing the city because it should have been safe! Even if it was a private company running the event, they’d get sued, along with the property owner for allowing it to happen, and the city for allowing them to run it in the first place.

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My calendar lists last Tuesday as “Election Patch Day.” (We had a state primary election, which fell on Microsoft’s second-Tuesday-of-the month schedule for releasing software updates.)

I guess you could consider elections to be patches keeping the government up to date.

Edit: On the other hand, there are usually two or more competing “patches” that disagree on how to fix the problems, and even what needs to be fixed.

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There are several things about Proposition 16 (on tomorrow’s California ballot) that just make me say, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

1. The ad campaign is horribly misleading. They’re promoting it as “Your Right To Vote,” but it has nothing to do with your right to vote. I guess “Making it hard for local governments to get into or expand the electricity business” isn’t snappy enough, but that’s what it actually does: it requires governments to hold additional elections (or piggyback on already-scheduled elections) if they want to get into the electricity business.

Whether it passes or not, your voting rights aren’t affected at all.

2. It’s oddly specific. If you look past the main slogan, you’ll see them talk about making sure governments don’t spend large amounts of money without voter approval.* But it only applies to the power industry. And it’s sponsored by Pacific Gas & Electric, the largest power company in the state.

That’s sort of like deciding that theft is a problem, but only making it illegal to steal from your house. If the problem is governments spending huge amounts of money, why focus only on one industry?

The whole thing comes off as being very self-serving, like Microsoft sponsoring an initiative to require a popular vote if a city wants to switch from Microsoft Office to Google Docs or OpenOffice.org.

*Of course, when you think about it, we approved the people making the decision when we voted them into office.

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