MANILA, Philippines — If you were online last Thursday, it is likely that you have chanced upon or heard about the issue regarding the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which was being debated last week in the US Lower House, and its corresponding bill in the Senate, the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act, or the Protect IP Act (PIPA). That’s because the biggest sites on the Web, such as Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia, carried out online protests against the passage of these bills into law. So that if you didn’t actually go to these pages, though chances are you might have, you might have heard about it in the news that night, if not on Yahoo! News.

This is not to mention the 7,000 or so other websites who carried out online ‘rallies’ of their own in the similar form of page blackouts, conspicuously large banners, or statements creatively worked into logos. But for two bills that, as their titles suggest, aim to curb online piracy, counterfeiting, and other infringements of intellectual property, all of which pose a threat to people who rely on the internet to make a living (these websites included), why is it that there is so much uproar in the internet community?

This was how it seemed to me when news of SOPA and PIPA started making it to the cable news networks some days before the protests started. Much of the airtime focused on commentaries and discussions of the interests that lay on either side of the fence: much of the time, it was framed as a conflict between traditional Hollywood media companies and organizations such as the MPAA and the more innovative, up-and-coming groups on the internet. The rhetoric in many cases clearly favored the opposition, but it was still difficult to understand; it is easy to be turned off when the more technical aspects of the internet, such as DNS blocking, proxy servers, and IP addresses are mentioned.

In fact, given a little patience all this jargon is easily understood. And it is extremely important to do so, because at the heart of the opposition to SOPA and PIPA is how it affects a central feature of the internet: the Domain Name System, or DNS.

Simply speaking, DNS is the framework which allows us to type in names such as www.myblog.com or www.yourwebsite.net on our address bars as opposed to numbers such as 110.24.166.132. These numbers represent the IP addresses, or the “real” addresses of various sites, and the DNS can be thought of as a people-friendly system for accessing these sites. The most commonly-used analogy for the DNS is that it operates like the Internet’s phone book, where a user “dials” the domain name to reach the website he/she wants, which DNS translates into IP addresses, therefore allowing us to connect to the corresponding website via URL and other locating tools. It is a people-friendly system that makes navigating the internet not just possible, but also easy and convenient.

One of the critical features is DNS blocking which, as CNET suggests, is the internet equivalent of a death penalty because it renders a website accused of copyright infringement virtually inaccessible—at least, for those of us who are not as well-versed with computers, or do not have that controversial plug-in. This is a problem for many websites that host or generate content—online news, blogs and social networks included. The problem arises with the fact that a) the sites themselves are possible for policing their own content, which is extremely costly and ruins the experience of consumers, and b) the broadness of the bill’s wording could supposedly make it very easy to shut any site down due to a single complaint (not to mention a host of other problems like the vulnerability to private action, the extent of the liabilities, etc.) This problem, the fact of being constantly monitored as well as the need for websites to monitor themselves, constitutes a threat to the very survival of many online communities, businesses, and pages.

What does this mean for users like us? For one thing, the bill will make it difficult if not impossible to watch copyrighted content that is illegally uploaded on YouTube (episode excerpts, for example, or entire segments of movies or TV series episodes.) It might also make it very difficult to post content on Facebook (for example, homemade videos using songs by popular artists) because the site will have to monitor the materials posted. Thus, posting may now take a longer time: hours, if not days. And of course, if any site with a .com or .net is reported to have published pirated content (torrents of albums and movies, for example), it will be rendered permanently inaccessible for many conventional net users.

In a country like ours, where piracy is so innocuous that people brush aside the fact that it’s illegal, the effects are potentially huge. But this is only because we have become used to an internet regime where content, copyrighted or not, is so easy to acquire, and generally free of charge. The larger question still, of course, is whether this sort of a regime is best for the flourishing of the internet. Sites such as Google and Facebook have provided a measured response: in a way, yes, but there is still a need to combat piracy in the long run. What they are clamoring for is a more targeted and creative solution to the problem of rogue websites that steal intellectual property and profit off them.

In the meantime, SOPA has been shelved by its sponsor, Rep. Lamar Smith, until a consensus regarding the solution can be reached. It is a victory for the online community today, but eventually the issue will have to be faced again in the near future.