Many foreigners have been viewing with a cynical eye the soap opera in the U.S. Congress embroiled in a debate over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) legislation. While many supporters argue it is needed to combat online infringement, the rest of us shake our heads with disdain as the USA spirals into a seemingly bottomless abyss once reserved for banana republics ruled by tyrants and puppet governments of the cold war era.

While far-fetched that the “great firewall of the United States.” will be enacted in its present proposed state, a more plausible scenario will be something slightly less ominous with a slew of politicians slapping themselves on the back arguing we should just pinch our noses and grimace as we swallow like a bitter pill the hard fought compromises that make their way into the final package.

Canada's Michael Geist took a look at the bill from a Canadian perspective and realized that the bill would lead to censorship of Canadian websites as well, as those in many other countries thanks to the ridiculous broad manner by which SOPA sets up its censorship mechanism: (Michael Geist holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and e-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law.)

The U.S. approach is breathtakingly broad, effectively treating millions of websites and IP addresses as “domestic” for U.S. law purposes. The long arm of U.S. law manifests itself in at least five ways in the proposed legislation.

First, it defines a “domestic domain name” as a domain name “that is registered or assigned within a judicial district of the United States.” ...Which means every dot-com, dot-net and dot-org domain is managed by a domain name registry in the U.S., so the law effectively asserts jurisdiction over millions of domain names without regard to where the registrant actually resides.

Then it defines “domestic Internet Protocol addresses” — the IP addresses, as “an Internet Protocol address for which the corresponding Internet Protocol allocation entity is located within a judicial district of the United States.” … ARIN allocates the block of IP addresses used by Canada, its federal and provincial governments, as well as 20 Caribbean nations as domestic!

Third, the bill grants the U.S. in rem jurisdiction over any website that does not have a domestic jurisdictional connection. For those sites, the U.S. grants jurisdiction over the property of the site and opens the door to court orders requiring Internet providers to block the site and Internet search engines to stop linking to it.... well it appears they still know what a court order is.

But, should a website owner wish to challenge the court order, U.S. law asserts itself in a fourth way, since in order for an owner to file a challenge, the owner must first consent to the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts.

Then it makes it a matter of U.S. law to ensure that intellectual property protection is a significant component of U.S. foreign policy and grants more resources to U.S. embassies around the world to increase their involvement in foreign legal reform.

Just what we all need... the U.S lobbying around governments around the world! Seriously... this has got to stop!

If you need just one more reason to dump the dot com dot net domains ... back in July, Verisign announced that effective Jan. 15, 2012, an increase in registry domain name fees for .com and .net, per its agreements with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).