Britain Needs Wake-up Call: Acta is Big Brother of Sopa, Says Analyst

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Ferguson attacked the closed-door policy of by legislators in Acta's development. "Acta is proposed as a global 'agreement' which has been negotiated in closed shops with only one side of the debate having been represented and no jurisdictional or democratic oversight, " said Ferguson.

"The closed shop appears to have been cynically and deliberately set up outside of existing structures such as the WTO [World Trade Organisation]  perhaps to protect vested interests of large corporations and a subset, in fact a tiny minority, of governments."

The comments refer to the lack of solid information on Acta, with the final draft of the agreement - which is reportedly very different from the original version - yet to be formerly released.

Censoring the Internet: An End to Innovation

Additionally, lending credence to protesters' fears, Ferguson indicated a belief that the agreement would grant authorities and corporations the power to censor the internet. Specifically, he suggested Acta would make it possible for the establishment to remove sites from search results for crimes perpetrated by users rather than the site itself.

"The concerns with Acta centre mostly around how the bill enforces liability on website for any links that point to disputed content. In the world of user-generated content [UGC], the potential for any site to be forced to close down, in a Stalinesque way to become a 'non-site' as it is obliterated from search results  or even have its domain name seized, all as a result of the actions of its users, is seen as too great a threat to business online," said Ferguson.

"Under Acta, ISPs will become accountable for the actions of their subscribers and as such will have no option but to monitor the content that is being both posted and accessed by their customers."

Ferguson indicated his belief that should Acta be passed, it would kill innovation online and invade users' privacy. Specifically, Ferguson suggested that in order to enforce Acta governments would have to install draconian policies that monitor what content was linked to on each website.

"The only space left for innovation and collaboration in an Acta world is for Acta compliance solutions that continually monitor your web properties for infringements (thereby monitoring also the content of any linked site as well) and remove any offending UGC promptly.