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Ask HN: SOPA in America - Will IT go overseas?

9 points by bad_alloc ↗ HN
From my comfortable (regarding IT-laws, not the financial crisis) watching post in Europe I've been following the frenzy in the American Internet industry, that has been stirred up by SOPA. Some people even think that Google might move its DNS-Servers to Europe. Do you think other firms might also migrate overseas? Will there be some kind of new IT-boom in Europe (or somewhere else, like India) whilst America is simply left behind by "fleeing" companies? Or is this simply a hype with negative results only for the users?

Regards, bad_alloc

3 comments

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mrkmcknz
The UK could be in for a treat...
bediger
I would guess that some IT flight would occur, but mostly, SOPA will be (and it will pass) a bonus for lawyers. Nothing will happen for a while, some really egregiouis sites will get Great Firewalled. Then someone with really deep pockets and user-generated content will get sued. There will be a frenzy of removing blogs, sites with user-generated contents, etc etc. After a while, a few big sites will get enough lawyers on-board to censor user-generated content, and we'll be back in the situation of the 1970s, where a few large newspapers could have lively "letters to the editors" pages, but nobody else could afford it.

Welcome to TV 2.0!

pasbesoin
Two points:

1) In my opinion, the U.S. has already pushed a similar agenda abroad (e.g. New Zealand), as a prelude to and argument for introducing it domestically.

2) If I were part of the "still free" "rest of the world", I would be actively planning and working to "route around" the seemingly inevitable and impending "damage". (The problem with this being that the damage is becoming so widespread that it may soon pass critical mass.)