Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet (42 page)

The two bills were the Senate’s Protect IP Act and the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act, or #PIPA and #SOPA as they became known on Twitter, where millions of tweets condemned them and their supporters in and out of Congress. Heavily backed by D.C. favorites including the U. S. Chamber of Commerce and the music and motion picture industries, the legislation was superficially aimed at combating the scourge of foreign websites selling unlicensed or counterfeit American goods to U.S. consumers outside the legal reach of criminal and civil enforcement.

But to Internet users, the proposed legislation and the process by which it was steamrolled through a supine Congress took on mythic attributes. By January the firefight had morphed into a battle of old economy vs. new, of business as usual in Washington vs. the organized chaos of online life, of K Street lobbyists vs. ordinary users.

The Internet was having its Howard Beale moment—users were mad as hell, and they weren’t going to take it anymore. The legislation needed to be stopped, by any means necessary. PIPA and SOPA became nothing less than a referendum on who controlled the evolution of digital life. And amidst the smoke and noise on the field, it was hard to tell who was really directing the troops.

One thing is now entirely clear. The Internet won, at least for now. A week or two before, at the annual Consumer Electronics Show, lawmakers and industry representatives were clearly in retreat, calling at last—but with panic in their eyes—for constructive dialogue. Sandra Aistars, executive director of the Copyright Alliance, even complained that the technology community had failed to propose concrete “tweaks” to fix the bills. “A lot of the response has been amped up rhetoric that misstates the bills and the intentions of its proponents,” Aistars said. “It is not directed to particular fixes.”

But the time for constructive dialogue, which Congress and industry groups had overtly snubbed all year, was over. As CES attendees made their way home over the holiday weekend, the Obama administration, which had been notably silent, weighed in against the bills in their current form. “While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response,” administration officials said, “we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.”

Another nail.

By the time the Congressional Internet Caucus convened its annual “State of the Net” meeting a few days later, it was clear that something dramatic was happening. Defections accelerated to an unprecedented rate as advocacy groups opposed to the bills shuttled between Congressional offices. Co-sponsors were now condemning the legislation. By Tuesday, it was no longer clear if Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) even had enough votes to stop a promised filibuster from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) on Jan. 24th, when Reid intended to force a floor vote on PIPA.

On Wednesday, the rebels detonated their nuclear option. Wikipedia and reddit, along with other popular websites, went black, generating thousands of calls and millions of emails, many from constituents who had likely never heard of the legislation the day before. Online petitions picked up ten million signatures, members of Congress received three million emails and a still-unknown number of phone calls. Thirty-four senators felt obliged to come out publicly against the legislation. That night, all four Republican candidates condemned the bills during a televised debate.

The State of the Net, as I said at one of several events that week, was very very annoyed.

By Friday, what had long been seen even by opponents as a done deal had become a deal undone. Both Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tx.), chief sponsors of PIPA and SOPA respectively, threw in the towel. Scheduled votes were off, planned markups were canceled; the legislation was dead. The war was over, at least for now, and perhaps until after the 2012 elections.

After the SOPA/PIPA battles had ended, there was a sense that the backers of the two bills had been thoroughly beaten and battered. This cartoon from Free Press helps capture that sentiment.

After sixteen successful efforts to extend or enhance copyright law over the last thirty-five years, the content industry’s perfect winning streak had finally ended. There was only now to cart off the dead and count up the wounded, and the battle would be over. At least until the next time.

Meanwhile, now seems as good a time as any to ask what the uprising really meant. Who was behind the remarkable campaign to stop the bills? How did they turn a bi-partisan majority against the legislation? Why did they care?

These are not merely academic questions. A new and profoundly different political force has emerged in the last few months, a constituency that identifies itself not by local interests but as citizens of the Internet. Understanding who
they are and what they want is essential for both the winners and losers in the slugfest. Ignore the lessons of the great uprising—of the dramatic introduction of “bitroots” politics—at your peril.

While there was plenty of traditional interest group politics at work here, the big story of the Blackout week (largely missed by traditional media) was the great awakening of Internet users. To be sure, the Consumer Electronics Association and advocacy organizations including NetCoalition were early in sounding the alarm about the proposed legislation nearly a year prior.

And a joint letter to Congress in mid-November from leading technology companies including Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and eBay expressing concern over PIPA and SOPA was clearly one of many key events in turning momentum against the proposed laws. Visits from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists played a role as well.

But to imagine that the millions of Internet users who took to the virtual streets over the last few months were simply responding to the clarion call of technology companies misses the real point—dangerously so.

Rather, it was the users who urged and sometimes pressured technology companies to oppose the bills, not the other way around. While the big companies eventually came on board, the push for them to do so came largely from activists using social networking and social news sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and reddit, to build momentum and exert leverage, sometimes on the very companies whose tools they were using.

If there is a first mover in this creation story, it would start with the influential blog Techdirt and its founder Mike Masnick. When PIPA passed out of a Senate committee in May without any debate, Masnick started writing every day (sometimes many times a day) about the potential danger of the bill and the disingenuous process by which it was being railroaded through Congress.

Progress seemed to be made. Over the summer, House leaders promised to fix the many problems in PIPA in their soon-to-be-introduced version of the bill. The technology community had been heard.

But when SOPA was unveiled in October, the seventy-page draft was worse—far worse—than PIPA, offering a virtual Christmas list of new legal powers and technical remedies for copyright and trademark holders, none of which would have done much to stop infringement even as they rewrote basic rules of digital life.

In the name of combating rogue foreign websites, SOPA would have allowed law enforcement agencies and private parties to force U.S. ISPs to reroute user requests, force search engines to remove valid links, and require ad networks and payment processors to cut ties with condemned sites.

Users who streamed a minimal amount of licensed content without permission, including through YouTube, would face felony charges. And most of the new powers made use of short-cut legal procedures that strained the limits of due process.

That’s when the activists, online and off, shifted into high gear. The crusade was picked up on the social news site reddit, which in turn drove protests
at Tumblr and Mozilla, among others. At one point, reddit users organized a boycott of domain registrar GoDaddy, which was forced to beat a hasty retreat from its longstanding support for the bills in a very public and embarrassing about-face.

The rebels had learned the Death Star’s fatal design flaw, and were massing to exploit it.

It was this groundswell of opposition—the first signs of a coherent and powerful bitroots movement—that pushed executives at these companies and later their more established peers to go public with what had been more discreet opposition to the bills. In particular, Google, which had hedged on PIPA earlier in the year, took up the anti-SOPA flag and ran it through anyone on Capitol Hill who got in the way. And they brought many of their competitors along for the fight.

In Washington, the accepted wisdom by year-end was that the technology industry had matured at last into a lobbying force commensurate with its size and pocketbook. But what everyone missed was that the users had opened a third front in this fight, and clearly the one that determined its outcome.

The bitroots movement wasn’t led by Google. It wasn’t led by anyone. Even to look for its leaders is to miss the point. Internet users didn’t lobby or buy their way into influence. They used the tools at their disposal—Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter and the rest—to make their voices heard. They encouraged voluntary boycotts and blackouts, and organized awareness days. This was a revolt of, by, and with social networks, turning the tools that organized them into groups in the first place into potent new weapons for political advocacy. The users had figured out how to hack politics.

Now that the prototype has proven effective, we can expect similar responses to proposed legislation and regulation affecting other aspects of digital life in the future. And Internet activists will continue to co-opt the latest technology in singular pursuit of their goals and agendas.

Which are what, exactly? The answer is easy to find. And necessary. Those who are serious about channeling the energies of the PIPA and SOPA revolt into productive uses need to understand not just the how but also the why of the big victory.

The political philosophy of the Internet, though still largely unformed, is by no means inarticulate. The aspirations of Internet users largely reflect the best features of the technology itself—open, meritocratic, non-proprietary, and transparent. Its central belief is the power of innovation to make things better, and its major tenet is a ruthless economic principle that treats information as currency, and sees any obstacle to its free flow as inefficient friction to be engineered out of existence.

Those seeking to understand what kind of governance Internet users are willing to accept would do well to start by studying the engineering that establishes the network and how it is governed. The key protocols and standards that make the Internet work—that make the Internet the Internet—are
developed and modified by voluntary committees of engineers, who meet virtually to debate the merits of new features, design changes, and other basic enhancements.

The engineering task forces are meritocratic and open. The best ideas win through vigorous debate and testing. No one has seniority or a veto. There’s no influence peddling or lobbyists. The engineers are allergic to hypocrisy and public relations rhetoric. It’s as pure a form of democracy as has ever been implemented. And it works amazingly well.

Today’s Internet activists have adopted those engineering principles as their political philosophy. In that sense, their core ideals have not changed much since 1996, when John Perry Barlow published his prophetic “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” in response to an equally ill-considered law that banned “indecent” content from the then-primitive World Wide Web (the U.S. Supreme Court quickly threw it out as unconstitutional). “We have no elected government,” Barlow wrote, “nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks.”

Barlow went on to “declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.” Barlow explains both the good and the bad, the productive and destructive, of the spirit that brought Congress to its knees. And does so, as with Jefferson two hundred years before, in the language of a poet. (Seriously, just follow the link and read the whole thing.)

In their political youth, Internet users are still profoundly idealistic and even a little naïve. They believe in democracy, freedom of expression, and transparent governance; they have little tolerance for draconian rules, for back-room deals, or for imposed legalistic “solutions” to poorly-defined problems that might be better solved with more technology. They are, if anything, more libertarian than anything else. But even that label implies a willingness to engage in traditional political theater, a willingness that doesn’t exist.

Like most online communities, this political activism is largely nonhierarchical, relying on consensus and open debate rather than delegation. Titles and resumes play little part in deliberations—each user and her point of view is evaluated on the strength or weakness of their argument.