The Internet Uprising

Today, Wikipedia, Google, and other online web sites (both large and small) were staging protests against two bills before the U.S. Congress: SOPA and PIPA. The bills are meant to attack piracy, but do so in such a draconian manner as to risk compromising core principles of the internet.

I was going to join several of my co-workers and write my own commentary on the issue. I felt myself in an interesting place as an employee of a company that provides entertainment that could be pirated, but that also relies on the internet for distribution. Thoeretically, I could have sympathies for both sides of the issue -- and I knew with every fiber of my being that the proposed legislation was wrong, wrong, wrong. I was going to use my time and space to implore people to take actions against the bills as recommended by Wikipedia: contact your local congressman.

But the day is waning, and some funny things have happened before I could get to writing this post. In a nutshell, the protests worked. Apparently, the sponsors of the bill were absolutely deluged with complaints today, as one by one, they all announced a withdrawal of support for their own measures. So, crisis... well, perhaps not "averted," but certainly "forestalled." It may well still be worth contacting your congressman to tell them they'd better fly right on this issue in the future, but it's not "all hands on deck" aboard the Good Ship Cyberspace.

So instead, a few random thoughts on the fact that the protest did apparently work.

Much has been made in recent years of how much money has infested American politics, how beholden politicians are to the rich people (and now, the corporations -- thank you Citizens United and the Supreme Court!) whose vast wealth gets them into office. And fundamentally, that hasn't really changed overall. But right up until literally yesterday, the sponsors of this bill had been unwavering in their message about SOPA and PIPA. They believed that any opposition to their measure was coming from an insignificant minority, from the very pirates they thought the bill would stop, and they were dismissing this opposition as anything from malicious to stupid. The money of Hollywood movie studios, most concerned about piracy at the moment, was ringing louder in the Congressional ears.

And yet, today, phone calls and e-mails from actual citizens made a difference. That's something that many people thought couldn't possibly happen anymore, and I was turning into one more than I care to admit. So, score one for representative democracy.

...I guess. Not a big score. After all, the desired outcome here was for Congress to "do nothing," and gridlock is really what they excel at.

I just wish there were some other important issues that people would get as worked up about as the internet. Maybe then some real improvements could happen.