Right, a lot of the issue is that SOPA/PIPA (and before that, PATRIOT, NDAA, etc) have poisoned the water between ~the users of the Internet and ~the Government.
Yes. And this retroactive immunity for illegal (and in some cases criminal) activities, which Candidate Obama supported despite telling me ~six months earlier he would not:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9986716-38.html
"...voting to derail lawsuits against telecommunications companies that unlawfully opened their networks to the National Security Agency. Senators voted 69 to 28 for the bill, which would rewrite federal wiretap laws by granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies..."
This is a continuation of our disagreement above, I know, but if you have an entity that has advanced problematic proposals multiple times when it comes to regulating technology -- and at times demonstrated a near-complete lack of understanding of what they're trying to regulate -- it's not unreasonable to apply more scrutiny to future proposals.
You're right that nobody should be making inaccurate claims about the bill (though I try to be charitable and say inaccurate claims in either direction are misunderstandings, not intentional distortions). I'm making a slightly different point, which is an argument for lower threshold to trigger scrutiny, and a higher threshold to legislate in the first place.
My objection to this line of reasoning is that there is only one entity producing U.S. legislation, so there is no real point of comparison. One cannot even compare Congress as a whole over time, since its membership changes (however slightly) every 2 years.
Also, is there any subject for which everyone can agree that Congress is good at proposing legislation? The whole point of the legislative process is to adjudicate between competing opinions; so whether any piece of legislation is "good" or "bad" will vary, to some extent, according to the observer.
Edit to add conclusion: Each bill should be judged on its merits, not on the fact that it comes out of Congress (since that is where they all come from).
