We have to assume this kind of thing happens all the time in Congress, but the specifics of the exchange point to a broader idea. It's less that the spat itself threatens to allow SOPA to pass unchallenged but rather the attitudes that it reveals. In a way, it relates to an even more troubling conclusion about the lawmakers' digital maturity. Sheila Jackson clearly does not understand that trolling is best left unaddressed. Maybe that's too nuanced, but it reminds us of some other anxiety-inducing statements that the committee members made about the Internet. Alexandra Petri calls the hearings "nightmarish" in her Washington Post column and describes a second troubling exchange:

It’s exactly as we feared. For every person who appears to have some grip on the issue, there were three or four yelling at him. "I'm not a nerd," said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D- Calif.). "I aspire to be a nerd." "I'm a nerd," said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). If I had a dime for every time someone in the hearing used the phrase "I'm not a nerd" or "I'm no tech expert, but they tell me . . .," I’d have a large number of dimes and still feel intensely worried about the future of the uncensored Internet.

Ugh. While it's good to know that we have one self-identified nerd (three cheers for Darrell the Dweeb!) we wonder if the members debating this bill actually understand how the Internet works at all. So does Petri and uses a haunting analogy to portray why:

If this were surgery, the patient would have run out screaming a long time ago. But this is like a group of well-intentioned amateurs getting together to perform heart surgery on a patient incapable of moving. "We hear from the motion picture industry that heart surgery is what’s required," they say cheerily. "We’re not going to cut the good valves, just the bad -- neurons, or whatever you call those durn thingies." This is terrifying to watch. …

It totally is! Just like the 20 wasted minutes that Jackson spent complaining about Stephen "Twitter Troll" King -- and let's be fair: 20 minutes is a drop in the bucket for the 12-hour-long hearing -- worrying about whether the members of the Judiciary committee undertand how well SOPA would work in combatting privacy versus is peanuts compared to crying yourself to sleep over the extent to which these lawmakers don't even understand how the Internet works. Elizabeth Stark, an Internet law expert tweeted a telling image near the end of the hearing. "Our politicians' understanding of the Internet…"

We're not saying that all of the members of the House Judiciary Committee are complete digital luddites, but other legal scholars do not seem very encouraged. We recently spoke to Jonathan Zittrain, a professor and cofounder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, who maintains a number of deep concerns about the implications of SOPA, and while he's been outspoken elsewhere about the specific line items within the bill that frighten him, he told The Atlantic Wire that he was basically confused about why Congress hasn't done any real data-driven research into the problem of online piracy. "I would like to find a well-researched, peer-reviewed, credible study about the dimension of the problem this is trying to solve," Zittrain said, noting that he did not know of such a study -- and since he wrote the book on the future of the Internet, he would know if one existed. "It's costless to the aggrieved industries, so why not do it?"

Correction: An earlier version of this post mistakenly referred to Rep. Darrell Issa as a Democrat from Oregon. Issa is in fact a Republican from California. Rep. Ron Wyden, the member who co-authored OPEN with Issa, is a Democrat from Oregon.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

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