If a site uses a US based hosting company, domain name (e.g. .com), or payment processor, those services may still be cut off, even if the servers are out of the country.

I doubt they would have any legal basis for extraditing a non-US-citizen for a SOPA violation, but there have been attempts to pursue charges against foreign citizens for notable DMCA violations if they enter the US, so that could continue to be the case with SOPA. If a US citizen uses a foreign server, I doubt that would shield them from legal action.

According to http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6134/135/, IP addresses issued by American Registry for Internet Numbers (the US regional IP issuing agency) is under the SOPA's jurisdiction. The problem is that they give out the IPs for US, Canada, and a bunch of the Carribean.

ARIN assignments aren't enforced by any kind of automated means. If ARIN tells some Canadian company, "Sorry, SOPA says we have to kill your assignment", and the Canadian company says "Thanks, but we'll keep using 123.89.12.0/24 anyway", it's all up to the canadian company's routing peers whether they want to enforce ARIN's edict.

If these peers choose to ignore ARIN's edict, it raises a number of troubling questions, mind you - so we don't really want to go that route if we don't have to. But the point is, Canadian ISPs could very well take a stand against the US using ARIN to enforce SOPA overseas.

Interesting. I hadn't thought of that.

I never understood why the US gets to own the .com TLD.

Because the US created it, along with the internet. Luckily it's no longer maintained by the Department of Defense.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc920

No, no longer the DoD but Department of Commerce ...

Who cares is the OPs point. The general populace doesn't think or care where a server is located. The message needs to be framed in a way that mainstream people understand.

I understand that, I'm just curious from a personal point of view.