A decade after SOPA and PIPA
A backlash that can never be repeated
Yes, I know this is late. I was working on a post and I figured out I did the math wrong. I was trying to salvage the idea, but I got stuck in revisions and the feeling of moving past the topic. Visa likes to say that you should write while an idea is fresh and he is right. Sitting on a blog post idea for too long is not good.
Billy reminded me today of SOPA and PIPA. Since I had a very minor part in the English Wikipedia’s role in this, I wrote a retrospective of what I think happened that week and why it is lightning in a bottle.
Just over a decade ago the internet shut down for the day. Congress was fast-tracking through a pair of bills — the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act (SOPA and PIPA)— to clamp down on internet piracy. While based on policy objectives that I might disagree with, they did have a large constituency of lobbyists and companies who believed that something needed to be done. To end digital piracy, the bills struck into the heart of the internet.
Background
When you type in a web address into your browser, like https://guerillero.net, your computer does not know where that is on the internet. Computers recognize locations by a string of numbers known as an IP address. To connect between the web address and the IP address, your computer reaches out to the giant phone book of the internet called the Domain Name System (DNS). DNS knows that guerillero.net can be found at 142.93.10.183. With that crucial piece of information, your computer can bring up the website in your browser.
What SOPA and PIPA proposed to do is to require that DNS providers delist websites that host infringing content. If I hosted ripped movies on guerillero.net and you tried to connect to it you would instead get an error. This sounds like a great idea at first but raises some important issues. One of the biggest is the way that this can be used to censor news reporting. Imagine a large multinational energy company was covering up its role in a massive oil spill in Africa. If the New York Times received internal documents from a whistleblower showing how the disaster was covered up, the energy company could use its ownership of the copyright of those documents to shut down worldwide access to the New York Time’s website.
Shutdown
For obvious reasons, this made a mixture of civil libertarians and tech companies unhappy. On January 18, 2012, websites including the English Wikipedia, 4chan, Google, Wired, and Reddit either went dark or covered up their logo. They also pushed users in the United States to contact their senators and representatives.
I vividly remember that day. I remember counting down the minutes to midnight UTC in IRC; excited for the English Wikipedia to do its part to stop this bill. A week earlier I had voted in favor of the blackout. After moving to DC, I have met and talked with people who worked on the hill and had a very different memory of that day. It was one of the first times in a while that the phones rang off the hook.
Due to the size of the backlash, the bill was defeated. What tech companies did that day influences the kinds of legislation around internet piracy and copyright that get introduced. I have had a number of friends who work on intellectual property who think the reason that works are entering the public domain each year is because of what we did. Disney is afraid of the backlash of trying to extend copyright another time.
Never again
The problem is, a decade later, I think that what we did lives on in the imaginations of lobbyists and hill staffers, but does not reflect the reality of the situation on the ground. I think that if SOPA and PIPA were introduced today, the English Wikipedia would not shut down for the day. The community was driven much more by idealism then. Today, there would be much larger concerns about the encyclopedia interfering with the political process. There was also an attempt for other bills in other countries to replicate the magic of the SOPA and PIPA protest and none of them have panned out.
Billy asked about the “last time we all felt good about the internet and fought for it” and that is a central problem. 2012 was the last throws of the idealism of the internet. The next year, was the start of what became Gamergate. That was the beginning of a line of dominos that leads directly to Donald Trump’s presidency. A decade removed from the SOPA and PIPA protests, I think it is the end of the golden age of the millennials on the internet.
Antitrust
Right now, the Senate is working on an antitrust bill that directly targets large tech companies. Silicon Valley is so divided over the subject that the bills have moved out of committee with minimal protest. If these bills appeared in 2012, people would lose their minds.
The bill, introduced by Amy Klobuchar and Tom Cotton, is a bad bill that will have lasting negative repercussions if it becomes law. What makes it especially painful is the way the market cap of companies is set. Amazon would be hindered while Walmart and Target, two of its biggest competitors, would be unaffected. Tom Cotton is a senator from Arkansas, where Walmart is headquartered, and Amy Klobuchar is a senator from Minnesota, where Target is headquartered. This is classic corporate welfare where the government is picking winners and losers. It does not help small companies, but instead is a handout to slightly smaller giant corporations. But, nobody seems to care.