I was pleased to see the measured tone of the White House response to the citizen petition about SOPA and PIPA, and yet I found myself profoundly disturbed by something that seems to me to go to the root of the problem in Washington: the failure to correctly diagnose the problem we are trying to solve, but instead to accept, seemingly uncritically, the claims of various interest groups.

Correct but impossible -- this is starting too large. ‘So maybe, instead of waiting for the MPAA’s next law and changing our Twitter avatars for a few days in protest, it would be more productive to significantly reduce or eliminate our support of the MPAA member companies starting today, and start supporting campaign finance reform.’

‘The trouble with taking a political stance on one issue is that your silence on every issue becomes a stance. Human rights abuses in Libya? Not as important as SOPA. Roe v Wade? Not as important as SOPA. Everything else that’s happened in the world until now, and everything that will ever happen from this day forward? Not as important as SOPA. This Wednesday, with its quixotic yelp in support of the Internet community’s issue-du-jour, Wikipedia will do more damage to its independence than SOPA ever could.’

‘It's no longer acceptable for us to not take responsibility for our Congress anymore. If we want it to be better then throwing bums out, and replacing them with new bums doesn't seem to be doing the trick. Let's work instead to educate whomever is in Congress, and the professional class around them. Let's do more of the stuff that works, and less of the stuff that doesn't.’

What to do in the short and long term about SOPA.