During the last year the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office of the Department of Homeland Security has launched a new campaign that involves seizing the domains used by websites involved in copyright infringement, the sale of counterfeit goods or child pornography. The problem is that the program has been borderline incompetent, taking legitimate foreign businesses offline, as well as earlier this year causing the outage of 84,000 largely legal websites after seizing the domain of a free DNS service operator.

After several failed attempts to pass a law codifying the government's efforts to seize and/or filter domains deemed dedicated to infringing activities, Uncle Sam's Protect IP Act is now winding its way through the legislative process. While politicians are pushing the bill at the behest of entertainment industry lobbyists, experts in DNS functionality continue to warn that the bill's focus on DNS filtering could fundamentally break the Internet. Meanwhile, Mike Masnick at Techdirt is doing an amusing job pointing out that many of the politicians who support the bill have absolutely no idea what it does:In short, as usual, a significant number of politicians have no idea about what this bill does or the technological problem it creates -- they're simply supporting it because the MPAA is telling (paying?) them to. Meanwhile, the MPAA Is telling everyone that they should ignore the concerns of a growing community of legal and technical experts (like Dan Kaminsky, Verisign CSO Danny McPherson, Paul Vixie and Georgia Tech DNS security expert David Dago) and simply trust them when they say this bill is necessary to prevent the Internet from becoming a "lawless Wild West."