But, Nuscha, we can read the Congressional Research Service summary of the bill on our own, and you already linked to it. Many hundred words that could have been used for thinking are used for summarizing provisions already comprehensively summarized in the public sources. This is not a good use of space.

Nor are the arguments advanced about why the bill is bad unfamiliar. Google has lobbied very extensively on this subject, for a change, and there's been no shortage of repetition of the points you duly repeat. Again.

There is no meaningful political analysis here. SOPA itself is essentially irrelevant. There's the Hollywood wishlist, and there's what can pass the Senate. Anything Mr Smith and his leadership are willing to move in the House will necessarily fall in between, and will have little influence over the outcome. You don't discuss the way the contribution game is played in election years, which is crucial to the history of this and similar past examples of Hollywood's (shrinking) power on Capitol Hill. You don't discuss the White House's careful and equally tactical silence, the nature of its political interests, or its (very high-quality and thorough, in my direct experience) engagement with the international implications you mention.

You don't mention or discuss the substantial, and novel, divergence of opinion between Hollywood and the cyberwarriors and national security buffoons—a new element this time around—which spells doom for the Hollywood position in long run.

Where, from the larger analytic point of view, one would want to be rising above parochial perspectives, taking a global approach, you're lost in the minutiae of the non-dominant House half of legislation that most likely won't move, in this one country, during an election campaign. Serious intellectual benefit would come from backing up a few meters, so as to see these US developments as part of a larger conflict, between national States and the network intermediaries. The US, Europe (including Sarkozyville and Cameroonia), India, China, are all engaged in different but converging efforts to embed their shrinking political authority in the fabric of the Net at the expense of the intermediaries (multinational data miners as well as local telecommunications network gangsters). The Net as a whole is made of cooperation; technically and socially it derives its functionality from consensus. It is robust against natural and technological disaster, but not against deterioration by inconsistent confrontational action by superstates. The crucial current process, in this light, is not the buying of a few Congressmen by a dying industry of no intrinsic importance, but the onset of state-level confrontation in the Net, against one another and for control of populations.

So I think there are two possible courses for the strengthening of this essay. Either you should strip out the mere re-summarizing of legislative provisions and lobbying positions, so as to make room for some new insights into the meaning of the SOPA/PIPA business on its own terms, or you should gain enough altitude to address the larger significance of the current moment, internationally.