Letter to my representative

letter.txt

As an entrepreneur and small business owner I can't afford to police
content. I develop and build websites for small start-ups every day
and I can tell you that building censorship tools would be costly.
Requiring the policing of all user contributed content would bring
most of these start-ups to their knees - removing all the jobs they
create. It is not trivial to remove all forms of links, many sites
struggle with this including Craigslist. Implementing the censorship
of linking is a dangerous and costly solution. Even if a site censors
straight links to a site successfully, it doesn't at all preclude
links which have been designed to get around the filters. Like
thepiratebay dot org slash one two three four.

Pirates will continue merrily on their way while real businesses
suffer. I can tell you as a technologist with 15 years experience
in networking and web development: this bill will not reduce piracy
at all! There will be no positive effect against pirates of any
kind. They already have removed all links from sites like
thepiratebay.org in preparation for this bill. All DNS blocks will
be routed around by using foreign DNS servers.

The text of the bill is pathetically naive about the concept of
"foreign" and "domestic". Most sites, even small ones, are hosted
in multiple countries and usually have several domain names with
different countries of origin. The person who wrote the bill was
apparently unaware of the basic networking concept of the CDN. A
CDN or content delivery network is a distributed network which
responds to the user with the server closest to their location.
With sites like CloudFlare.com even the poorest sites commonly use
these acceleration services.

The real danger behind this bill is the possibility for its abuse.
Once we implement the infrastructure and the culture of information
censorship then it becomes much easier for us to pick and choose
what is acceptable. This bill is ultimately the greatest threat to
our sacred freedom of speech in our lifetime. It builds the machines
of censorship in the name of stopping piracy.

In summary, this bill does not affect piracy on any level and it
will cost this country thousands of skilled jobs in one of the only
growing sectors. Please do everything you can to stop this legislation
Claire! Please save our liberty.

Thank you, Jonathan Jeffus

President Assured Development, LLC.