The Martlet

Something extraordinary happened on Jan. 18, 2012: the Internet struck back.

Against what you might ask? Well in case you had only recently heard, up until then the U.S. Congress was considering two pieces of bi-partisan legislation (endorsed by Democrats and Republicans) that were supported by the film, television and music industries, to fight online piracy: SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (the Protect Internet Protocol Act).

What changed their minds was the public outcry after Wikipedia and 152 000 other sites went dark for a day. What was it that provoked such protest?

These bills in their original forms would have allowed the U.S. attorney general and Justice Department to work with film, TV and music companies to isolate and shut down websites and their financial links with sites like PayPal: sites like Reddit, Google, Wikipedia, the PirateBay, Youtube and any other site that might have copyrighted material available for streaming or download anywhere in the world. They could also force sites like Wikipedia to extensively screen their content for anything that might violate copyright, crippling their ability to function as non-profits.

Making sure that authors, directors, screenwriters and musicians get paid is a noble aim, but SOPA and PIPA wouldn’t actually do that. Instead these acts would become a tool for corporations and the U.S. government to censor anything they might not like, or to stop startups that might be a problem for their bottom line. They also wouldn’t do anything about foreign websites hosting content, but would serve as precedent for other nations to write their own anti-Internet laws.

Thanks to an information campaign by the major tech giants of the Internet (Twitter, Google, Youtube, Facebook and Reddit), the call went out to flood switchboards, email accounts and phone banks of U.S. federal politicians with protests. Weeks before the blackout, Internet detectives looked through the dirty laundry of selected Senators that supported SOPA and PIPA and exposed it. This caused half a dozen Senators and Representatives to either declare neutrality or denounce the bills. Domain registration companies have lost thousands of domains in a few days for their support of SOPA. Go Daddy lost 50 000 domain names in two days, crippling their advertising revenue and link traffic; that’s like an advertising agency suddenly losing half its clients in a single day for supporting the tobacco industry.

As of Jan. 19, a majority of the U.S. Congress have now declared their opposition to the bills, and the bills have had the similar financial blocks to those that would sever PayPal from clients. The bills are going to be reintroduced on Jan. 29 and Feb. 25. But with such a shift of support from Republicans and Democrats against the bills and the White House stating its opposition, it looks like they will be quashed. ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), an international treaty version of SOPA and PIPA, is another story.

So what is this Internet response a sign of? For the last two years, there have been signs that the Internet is growing in commercial and political power. Amazon now sells more ebooks than hardcopy. iTunes and Youtube are used to promote albums. Twitter and other social media sites helped co-ordinate the Arab Spring and Occupy movements. Is this the final push of old media against new? I doubt it. But there will be more clashes as we move from an economy based in the Industrial and Modern Ages into the Information Age.