Thursday, November 29, 2012

Congressman proposes 2-year ban on bills about Internet

In an unusual step, a U.S. congressman is proposing a two-year ban on all new federal legislation regulating the Internet.

Rep. Darrell Issa, a Republican from California who has been an advocate for Internet freedoms, has posted online a draft of his legislation, the Internet American Moratorium Act of 2012. The bill would “create a two-year moratorium on any new laws, rules or regulations governing the Internet.”

Issa first posted the complete text of the bill Monday on Project Madison, the nickname for a crowdsourcing platform that allows citizens to amend individual passages of legislation by adding or striking language. On Tuesday, he posted a link to the bill on Reddit, the social news site, where users quickly voted it to the top.

“Together, we can make Washington take a break from messing w/ the Internet,” Issa said on Reddit, where he also invited users to suggest changes to the proposed bill. He said he will begin taking questions about it from Reddit users Wednesday morning.

Issa is one of the more tech-fluent members of Congress and was an outspoken critic of the Stop Online Piracy Act, which would have penalized websites that host pirated content. That bill died this year amid near-unanimous opposition from the technology industry.

It was not immediately clear whether Issa’s moratorium would apply to his own Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade (OPEN) Act, which would seek to protect U.S. copyrights and trademarks from infringement by foreign websites.

Full article: http://www.cnn.com/2 … rnet-bill/index.html



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