Todo lists are a great way to plan ahead for the day’s events. It gives an idea of how to divvy up your time. What, however, would such a list look like for a systems administrator who is firmly against SOPA/PIPA and any other Internet regulation the United States government introduces?

It might look something like this, courtesy of the news section at YCombinator.com:

Today’s sysadmin todo list:

0. Get corporate membership with EFF.
1. Identify all applications with user-generated content.
2. Move all associated domains to a non-US based registrar.
3. Migrate DNS, web serving and other critical services to non-US based servers.
4. Migrate yourself to a non-US controlled country.

I’m sorry for US sites and users. Your government is hell-bent on turning the internet into a read-only device like TV, easily regulated and controlled. The population will be required to sit quietly and keep their eyes glued on the screen so they don’t miss the ads, with any infringers deemed terrorists and pedophiles and thus deserving of summary punishment by DHS squads.

Hopefully the internet will route around the damaged segment, and the rest of us can continue to enjoy the amazing interactivity it has brought our society.

As TechDirt points out, the attitude of the government, as well as the content industry’s lobbyists, is one that doesn’t seem to mind if these very valid criticisms exist. TechDirt refers to at as the “what’s the big deal” attitude, and it’s quite fitting, especially when you consider the haphazard disregard federal law enforcement couldn’t care less about the multitude of gigabytes worth of legitimate content on Megaupload.

All they cared about was taking down a notorious file-infringing service.

There is one caveat to the sysadmin todo list, and it concerns moving to a non-US DNS servers and registrars. After SOPA took its initial public relations beatdown, Lamar Smith quickly surfaced to amend the bill to only target foreign sites. So while the government might not be able to seize a site with the characteristics the todo list describes, if SOPA were to pass, they could very well block it.

Whatever the case, if you’re at all worried about getting seized, perhaps a move to another non-US-based service might be in order.

Lead image courtesy.