The nightmarish SOPA hearings

[Commentary] Last night I had a horrifying dream that a group of well-intentioned middle-aged people who could not distinguish between a domain name and an IP address were trying to regulate the Internet. Then I woke up and the Judiciary Committee’s SOPA hearings were on. It’s exactly as we feared.

For every person who appears to have some grip on the issue, there were three or four yelling at him. “I’m not a nerd,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D- CA). “I aspire to be a nerd.” “I’m a nerd,” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA). If I had a dime for every time someone in the hearing used the phrase “I’m not a nerd” or “I’m no tech expert, but they tell me . . .,” I’d have a large number of dimes and still feel intensely worried about the future of the uncensored Internet. If this were surgery, the patient would have run out screaming a long time ago. But this is like a group of well-intentioned amateurs getting together to perform heart surgery on a patient incapable of moving. “We hear from the motion picture industry that heart surgery is what’s required,” they say cheerily. “We’re not going to cut the good valves, just the bad — neurons, or whatever you call those durn thingies.” This is terrifying to watch.