In a first victory for supporters of a free and open Internet, the vote on the highly controversial SOPA legislation has been delayed in the US Congress:

The House Judiciary Committee considering whether to send the Stop Online Piracy Act to the House floor abruptly adjourned Friday with no new vote date set—a surprise given that the bill looked certain to pass out of committee today.

The committee’s chairman and chief sponsor of the legislation, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), agreed to further explore a controversial provision that lets the Attorney General order changes to core internet infrastructure in order to stop copyright infringement. The abrupt halt to Friday’s proceeding, which followed a marathon-long, 11-hour hearing Thursday, was based on a motion from Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah). He urged Smith to postpone the session until technical experts could be brought in to testify whether altering the internet’s domain-naming system to fight websites deemed “dedicated” to infringing activity would create security risks.

Also lodged into the record was an open letter from 83 prominent internet engineers, including Vint Cert, John Gilmore and L. Jean Camp. ”The US government has regularly claimed that it supports a free and open internet, both domestically and abroad. We cannot have a free and open Internet unless its naming and routing systems sit above the political concerns and objectives of any one government or industry,” they wrote.

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In a first victory for supporters of a free and open Internet, the vote on the highly controversial SOPA legislation has been delayed in the US Congress: The House Judiciary Committee considering whether to send the Stop Online Piracy Act to the House floor abruptly adjourned Friday with no new vote date set—a surprise given ...