Picture a giant outdoor wall. Or, even better, thousands of them, in varying sizes.

Anyone can post whatever they want up there, generally- the wall space is there, they just have to make the poster. If someone posts something particularly awful, then police figure out who posted it, arrest them, and take down the offending poster.

What these bills do is put the onus of the policing on whoever owns the wall.

So, instead of having a big, public wall where people can put up their posters, now each owner of every wall will have to examine every poster that goes up, make sure it conforms to any number of dozens, hundreds, of different rules, and then finally put it up. If the owner doesn't do this, he will get fined, maybe worse.

In this analogy, the posters are ANYTHING you post on the web, ANYWHERE. Links, pictures, videos, text.

Which, you might say, is OK. Things people post should be regulated. Except the extent and scope of these bills are insane. It's like saying that, to prevent anyone from shouting "FIRE!" in a crowded movie theater, every single person should have to carry a recorder that monitors what they say.

The internet is heavily, HEAVILY dependent on user content. RAFO is an example- we come here to read the posts, and also post our own things. How would it be if our admin had to manually sift through every single thing we post?
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Of course, it probably wouldn't happen like that. What WOULD happen is, the Internet would turn into Youtube. Do you know much about Youtube's policies?

Basically, Youtube has to deal with thousands of banned videos a day. Sometimes it's porn, sometimes it's copyrighted content, sometimes it's something else. The point is, there is SO MUCH of it that, whenever someone registers a complaint, it is essentially yanked off of the site immediately. There's no way to stop it, and appealing it is a HUGE headache.

Youtube isn't the Evil Empire, of course- it's just a business. And even though it's part of a big corporation, it just doesn't have the manpower to manually review every challenge and make a thoughtful, measured decision. Plus, the risk is too high- do they really want to be sued by NBC over the definition of "fair use?"

That is what the internet would turn into. Big sites, like Youtube, could handle it, though they'd likely get a bit more draconian. Little sites would dry up, because they wouldn't be able to afford the kind of intense regulation the bills require.