Eric Schmidt, Google's chairman, has strong views on legislation setting up government Internet blacklists. "I would be very, very careful if I were a government about arbitrarily [passing] simple solutions to complex problems," Schmidt said during a Google conference in England today, according to the Guardian. "So, let's whack off the DNS. Okay, that seems like an appealing solution but it sets a very bad precedent because now another country will say, 'I don't like free speech so I'll whack off all those DNSs'—that country would be China."

Schmidt seems to have two targets in mind: the UK, where the Digital Economy Act allows for judicially ordered site blocking, and the US, where the newly introduced PROTECT IP Act hopes to monkey about with the domain name system (DNS) in order to cut off international pirate websites.

"If there is a law that requires DNSes to do 'x' and it's passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President of the United States and we disagree with it then we would still fight it," he added, according the Guardian.

And the Financial Times, also present for Schmidt's remarks, quotes him as saying that he has no interest in removing file-sharing sites from search results. "We have been in discussion with media companies for a long time; it is not obvious how to solve it," he said.

Back in Washington, this tough line has been echoed by trade group CCIA, of which Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other tech companies are members. "Meddling with Internet architecture to disappear sites and even hyperlinks to those sites is an Orwellian approach to law enforcement," said CEO Ed Black in a recent statement. "The solution to violations of intellectual property law is to enforce the law, not to engage in dangerous and fruitless efforts to sanitize the Internet."

"This directive may look different than Egypt or China’s Internet filtering and censorship," Black continued. "But technologically speaking shutting down parts of the Internet, even for a seemingly good reason, is still censorship—no matter what new name you give it. This bill would send a signal to Internet restricting countries that they can make similar demands and use similar tools—only for more sinister reasons."

Who doesn't think the PROTECT IP Act would make us too much like China? Forty-two US state attorneys general, who earlier this week signed onto a letter (PDF) begging Congress to pass the PROTECT IP Act before the year is out.

"A growing number of rogue websites are based overseas, presenting law enforcement with unique enforcement challenges," said the letter. "Legislation is needed to disrupt the counterfeiting and pirate business model by cutting those sites off from the American marketplace. This narrowly tailored response to clearly illegal activity would enable effective action against the worst of the worst counterfeiters and pirates online."