The Daily WTF has a commendable explanation of the effects of SOPA and the potential dismantling of the domain name system;

You see, back in the day, if you wanted to get online and access electronically-stored information like digitized photographs, electronic bulletin boards, and informational databanks, there was only one thing you needed: a telephone number. You’d simply fire up your favorite telecommunications program (mine was Telix), have it dial that phone number, and after a refreshing symphony of beeps and hisses, you were online.

Each phone number transported you to a quaint, peaceful community that was almost entirely self-sufficient. There was no “hyperlinking” between systems: you simply wrote down the phone number, signed-off of the current system, and then dialed into the new system. And let me tell you, there are few experiences in life that can parallel the utter bliss of discovering a new phone number and a new electronic resource.

...

SOPA and PROTECT-IP offer hope in returning to the golden age of telecommunications, and to the days before the Information Superhighway polluted the online culture with this domain name nonsense. Let the Domain Name System a natural death and prepare yourself for the Internet Protocol Number (IPN) renaissance. All you need to do is start a notebook that lists electronic resource names and their corresponding IPN. And let the first entry in your notebook be

     The Daily WTF     74.50.110.120

We can only hope that our legislators introduce common sense guidelines to ban HTTP (and HTML/JavaScript) as well so we can all return to the more sensible GOPHER standard.

As a translation for non-technical users; If the Americans decide to implement the extremely nearsighted SOPA legislation, it would set the Internet back by over twenty years.