Piracy runs rampant on the Internet, but Daniel Castro says it doesn't have to be this way. He wants the US government to start creating a blacklist of Internet sites; once approved by a judge, each site would be cut off from American Internet users at the Domain Name System (DNS) level, where readable locations like 'arstechnica.com' are turned into numerical IP addresses. US-based credit card companies would be forbidden from doing any business with the site, and US-based advertising networks couldn't serve ads to the site.
Sound familiar? It should—this is the basic outline of the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) legislation first introduced in Congress last year. Castro, a senior analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), coauthored a 2009 paper on Internet piracy (PDF) that included many of the ideas that found their way into COICA.
He testified this month before Congress about the need for such measures, and I spoke to him recently about Web blocking, censorship, and why he believes that deep packet inspection (DPI) of Internet traffic by ISPs is more like Gmail than wiretapping. As for due process, Castro says COICA is fair—but he's open to some tweaks.
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