Original article in Italian

SOPA and PIPA “undermine the internet’s fundamental architecture” professor James Boyle of Duke University said. And he is certainly right. Not by chance yesterday Massimo Gaggi on the Corriere della Sera reported the sarcasm of Chinese newspapers towards the implementation of the censorious barriers entailed by the approval of these bills. There is little space for rejoicing, to say it all. If by any (unlikely) mean the Stop Piracy Online Act and the Protect IP Act would succeed, even in their watered-down versions – against those initially proposed in US House of Representative and Senate – we would be witnessing a steady twist of the Internet as we knew it in the West.

The identity of the Internet – we should know it by now – is something temporary and the transformation of its main features (as, precisely, its architecture) is able to twist the practices of social communication that run through it.

And so what? The battles against SOPA and PIPA are most righteous ones, sacrosanct, to be absolutely won. At least in a tactical perspective. But please, let’s not picture these as battles for freedom of speech and, even less, to preserve those conditions of openness that turned Internet into the biggest agora in the history of mankind. The risk here is to jump out of the frying pan into the fire, without even realizing it. Prosegui la lettura »