The Internet Infrastructure's SOPA/PIPA Silver Lining

from the it-brought-people-together dept

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Ten years ago a massive, digital grassroots movement defeated the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House, and its Senate companion the Protect IP Act (SOPA/PIPA). Looking back, this signal victory drove an even more important outcome–the birth of a large wave of Internet activism organizations, including our own Internet Infrastructure Coalition (i2Coalition), a new, unified, independent voice for Internet infrastructure providers. 

Our story began in 2011 when I led operations for a web hosting company called ServInt. My future co-founder of the i2Coalition David Snead, was our outsourced General Counsel. He and I became alarmed about the damaging impact on the Internet infrastructure layer of a little-known bill, the Combating Online Infringement, and Counterfeits Act, or COICA, introduced by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT). 

While well-intentioned to combat infringement by foreign “rogue” websites, the bill would have allowed for the mass blocking of websites by the Department of Justice without due process, on the say so of intellectual property holders. We met with Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and his staff to seek advice about how to have a voice in the COICA debate. Their answer was direct : “get more of you.” 

At that point, it seemed like just a handful of small Internet infrastructure enterprises were even aware of COICA. We realized that we needed to start a grassroots movement.

We began intensive outreach to the Internet infrastructure community online and offline at conferences, meetings, and events, which led to formation of the “Save Hosting Coalition.”We launched letter writing campaigns to explain our deep concerns to legislators in Congress, which continued when SOPA/PIPA eventually superseded COICA. 

Fortunately, as our group worked to build a social media campaign and to connect with legislators, we found that we were no longer alone. The Consumer Technology Association, known then as the Consumer Electronics Association, had an active lobbying team who invited us to join them in their efforts to convince Congress of the dangers of SOPA/PIPA.

This broader collaboration became a turning point when we realized the crucial nature of our role in the SOPA/PIPA debate. As Internet infrastructure providers, we were best positioned to explain to policymakers how the technology works and that their well-intentioned proposals to fix problems actually would undermine the functioning of the Internet ecosystem. We showed that proposed SOPA/PIPA technical provisions would make it impossible for small and medium-sized Internet infrastructure businesses to continue operating at scale.

Our campaign against SOPA/PIPA culminated in our decisive conversation with Senator Jerry Moran (R-KS) and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, which helped convince Senator Moran to join Senator Wyden in a bipartisan hold on PIPA in the Senate. This procedural move froze Senate action for a bit, and gave the time for our new friends at Reddit and Fight for the Future to organize the Internet Blackout Day, which shut down 115,000 sites and galvanized public support for stopping the bills. We aided in the coordination of this vital day, which effectively stopped SOPA/PIPA in its tracks.

The power of facts made the difference in our collective victory. Concerned technology companies explained with one voice how the bills would destroy Internet infrastructure operations. Aligning with the CTA enabled a strong and unified advocacy campaign. Consequently, minds changed in Congress because members and staff heard rational arguments and listened to our concerns.

The SOPA/PIPA legislative debate made clear the ongoing threat of uninformed Internet policy. We saw the need for continued educational advocacy from our Internet infrastructure provider vantage point. 

Four companies in the Save Hosting Coalition (Rackspace, cPanel, Endurance (now Newfold Digital), and Softlayer) invested to keep our group going. On July 25th, 2012, we formally launched the Internet Infrastructure Coalition (i2Coalition) with 42 members with a mission to ensure that Internet infrastructure providers are at the table helping to solve future Internet policy problems. 

We believed then, as we do now, that Internet policy solutions should be scaled appropriately without creating barriers for new, small entrants in the infrastructure layer, be they college students innovating in their dorm rooms, or entrepreneurs fulfilling a need. Policymakers must understand the technology underlying all these small digital businesses to avoid laws and regulations that inadvertently would disrupt their functioning, ultimately limiting incentives for future innovation and market entry

We proudly reflect on our strong work a decade ago to educate Congress about how SOPA/PIPA would impair the Internet ecosystem. That successful fight led to the i2Coaltion’s formation, and our story is not unique. The most important outgrowth of the SOPA/PIPA saga turned out to be the creation of permanent organizations like ours, set up to defend Internet innovation.

There will always be a need for more Internet education for legislators and regulators, and there will always be somebody coming out with another SOPA/PIPA-like proposal. The Internet needs permanent voices ready to address both.

As we celebrate the i2Coalition’s 10 year anniversary in 2022, we know our work is always evolving. The Internet infrastructure industry today faces a diverse set of challenges involving security, safety, privacy, and more. We face many of the same intermediary liability focused challenges that we had when we started, particularly while engaging in complex issues such as Section 230 reform in the United States and the Digital Services Act in the EU. 

We need to keep learning together and empowering alliances with other like-minded stakeholders, to ensure that an educated appreciation of the nuts and bolts of how the Internet works informs policy making fully. At the i2Coalition we are as excited as ever about the digital future, and look forward to continuing to be the voice for the multitudes of businesses that build the Internet. 

Christian Dawson is the Co-Founder of the Internet Infrastructure Coalition (i2Coalition) where he works to make the Internet a better, safer place for the businesses that make up the Cloud.

This Techdirt Greenhouse special edition is all about the 10 year anniversary of the fight that stopped SOPA. On January 26th at 1pm PT, we'll be hosting a live discussion with Rep. Zoe Lofgren and some open roundtable discussions about the legacy of that fight. Please register to attend.

Filed Under: activism, cloud, copyright, infrastructure, internet infrastructure, lobbying, policy, sopa

The SOPA Fight Reminds Us Of The Internet's Power And Usefulness

from the don't-let-it-get-taken-away dept

Ten years ago this week, I watched my computer screen as much of the Internet slowly switched off. Over a hundred thousand websites, including that of our predecessor organization CEA, were going dark in a last-ditch protest of a House bill called the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA) and its Senate counterpart, the “Protect IP Act” (PIPA).

These bills were backed by large content companies concerned that the Internet would disrupt their longstanding business models. While we sympathized with their concerns about unauthorized downloading, we could not agree with their proposed solution: allowing content owners to easily "take down" entire websites, without due process or notification, if they claimed that the site hosted unauthorized content.

If these bills had passed, the consequences for the Internet would have been devastating. Any website featuring third-party content, including libraries and community bulletin boards, would have been vulnerable to sudden and permanent removal after a single complaint. Sites would vanish and have little recourse. Bad actors would run rampant, using the SOPA-PIPA process to harass competitors and censor opposing viewpoints.

Opposition to SOPA-PIPA had been slowly growing. A strange-bedfellows coalition ranging from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to the Heritage Foundation was opposing the bills. Artists like Amanda Palmer and OKGO denounced the bills’ impacts on creativity. A group of startup founders including Alexis Ohanian, Micah Shaffer, and Christian Dawson walked the Capitol meeting with legislators, many of whom had never previously been face-to-face with an internet entrepreneur. And at the 2012 CES, Republican Rep. Darrell Issa and Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden stood together and declared they would do anything in their power to stop the bills.

But this opposition, vigorous as it was, shrank in comparison to the bills’ support. SOPA and PIPA were backed by dozens of DC's biggest players, including the Motion Picture Association, the Recording Industry Association, and the powerful US Chamber of Commerce. SOPA had dozens of Congressional sponsors, including Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith.

In the Senate, PIPA sailed unanimously through the Judiciary Committee and Majority Leader Reid announced that he planned to bring the bill to the floor for a vote. By normal DC rules, the game was over and the bills were sure to pass.

But the Internet blackout drew public attention, and the tide quickly turned as Americans began calling and emailing their members of Congress. In total, more than 14 million Americans contacted their lawmakers to protest the legislation. I remember sitting in a legislator’s office the morning after the blackout and watching in sincere astonishment as the phone rang off the hook.

The impact was swift, as legislators rushed to take their names off the bills. For the first time, policymakers realized that the Internet wasn’t some fringe domain for computer geeks, it was a central and treasured element of their constituents' daily lives. Within a week, SOPA and PIPA had been pulled from consideration in the House and Senate.

The death of SOPA/PIPA unleashed a Cambrian Explosion of online innovation. Companies like Instagram, Tinder Slack, Patreon, and thousands of others changed the way we work, play, and live. Anyone who attended CES 2022 could not help but see the extraordinary dynamism and competition that currently exists in the technology industry.

The content industry also thrived once they stopped treating the internet as an enemy and began treating it as an asset. While content companies once declared that ”you can’t compete with free,” in the wake of SOPA-PIPA they pivoted to offering well-designed, consumer-friendly services at reasonable prices. 

According to the RIAA, U.S. recorded music revenues grew 9.2% in 2020, with 83% of the revenue coming from Internet streaming. The movie industry has seen similar gains, with global streaming video revenue projected to hit $94 billion by 2025. Meanwhile, independent creators used new internet platforms to present their work directly to fans without having to go through gatekeepers or intermediaries.

Most importantly, the post-SOPA-PIPA Internet has proven to be the most impactful communications platform in human history. On May 25, 2020, 17-year-old Darnell Frazier used her smartphone to document the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Posted to Facebook, this video kicked off an ongoing national conversation on race and injustice.

Similarly, in 2017 women took to the Internet to respond to sexual assault allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein and describe their own experiences under the hashtag #MeToo. Widespread media coverage changed the way our society responds to sexual harassment. For the first time, regular people have been empowered to speak to millions on important issues, and they are using the power to change society for the better.

Over the last decade, we have learned many lessons. We have learned that the Internet, while it provides tremendous benefits, is not perfect. That is why we need clear federal guidelines in areas like online privacy and digital currencies that protect consumers and promote innovation.

We have learned that Americans continue to care passionately about the Internet. Over the last two years during COVID, millions have gone online to work, educate their children, access health care, keep in touch with loved ones, and arrange delivery of critical goods. No wonder online companies rank highly in surveys of America’s most-loved brands.

However, the SOPA-PIPA fight is not over. In “Groundhog Day” fashion, threats to the free and open Internet are reemerging. Policymakers are threatening to increase government control over Internet speech, and impose other limitations that would harm online companies and small businesses.

Many of those pushing today’s “anti-tech” narrative are the same disgruntled competitors and legacy industries that engineered SOPA-PIPA. In fact, some broadcasters and content companies are even opposing an eminently qualified FCC nominee, Gigi Sohn, because of her correct and pro-consumer opposition to SOPA-PIPA a decade ago

Congress is now considering legislation that would eliminate products like Google Docs and Amazon Prime. These services are woven into the lives of millions who rely on them to surmount the difficulties of COVID. If Congress breaks these services, the reaction from voters could make the SOPA-PIPA earthquake look like a mild tremor. Similarly, you could predict a SOPA-PIPA-type backlash if the government places unreasonable restrictions on the 46 million Americans who own digital assets.

A few weeks after SOPA-PIPA died, I was ordering coffee when the barista pointed at the “STOP SOPA” sticker on my laptop. “I emailed my member of Congress about that, and it worked…It was the first time I felt I could actually change things in Washington,” he said.

Thankfully, ten years after SOPA-PIPA, the Internet’s ability to empower American expression and innovation is only just beginning.

Michael Petricone is the Senior VP, Government Affairs, at the Consumer Technology Association.

This Techdirt Greenhouse special edition is all about the 10 year anniversary of the fight that stopped SOPA. On January 26th at 1pm PT, we'll be hosting a live discussion with Rep. Zoe Lofgren and some open roundtable discussions about the legacy of that fight. Please register to attend.

Filed Under: activism, copyright, innovation, internet, open internet, sopa

10 Years Later: SOPA Protests Were A Turning Point, But Not The Beginning Or The End

from the the-fight-continues dept

The SOPA blackouts of 2012 marked an important milestone in the power of online activism to influence policy at the highest levels, but it would be a mistake to view it as either the start or the end of the struggle it represents. It is still among the most strikingly-effective examples to date, but it built on years of policy work that continues to this day.

Online activism is notoriously poorly preserved, and it rarely produces the salient visuals of offline protests. Massive crowds of people taking part in an online action can’t be photographed extending down city blocks; no hand-painted signs with powerful slogans or sea of faces with resolute determination will become the iconic image representing the moment. 

As a result, it’s easier to forget the early Web blackouts of 1996 protesting the passage of the Communications Decency Act, or the Gray Tuesday event of copyright civil disobedience in 2004, to name a few I spoke about the legacy of these three events, taken together, at re:publica 2014).

The SOPA protests provided a counter-example, in part, both because of the memorable visuals of the online “blackouts” and the in-person events coordinated in cities around the country. Images of Aaron Swartz, who had been a key organizer against the bill, addressing crowds at a New York rally illustrated articles about the online protests.

As important as the unprecedented scale of the online actions was the reception by the press, the public, and the political sphere. The SOPA blackout represented a moment of online grassroots activism demanding to be taken seriously, and getting the coverage and reception it deserved. Every major news outlet reported on the protests and, as an indicator of its prominence, each of the candidates vying for the Republican nomination for president were asked onstage about SOPA at a January 19 debate — surely a first for a copyright proposal. Their criticism was ample evidence of the cracks in the bill’s inevitability.

One long-term effect of the SOPA blackouts: it has seemed to meaningfully shift, perhaps permanently, the policy environment around copyright in particular. In 2011 and early 2012, SOPA appeared to be inevitable, in part because earlier industry-favored copyright proposals had both passed with near unanimity and withstood challenges that laid their irrationality bare.

After SOPA’s flame-out, it no longer seems like copyright law is something that can be hammered out by industry representatives behind closed doors (admittedly, this shift has corresponded with the rise of tech companies as lobbying giants with a different copyright agenda than the existing players, which has surely played a role). As just one example: In 2011, SOPA was inevitable, but so was an eventual expansion to the Copyright Term Extension Act, continuing the public domain freeze that had been running since 1998. Of course, that never came to pass, and the public domain has grown on January 1 every year since 2019.

That change wasn’t the result of the “war being won” — far from it. Increasing the costs of pushing through copyright policy has mostly shifted the battlegrounds in two major ways. 

First, big changes to how copyright gets enforced in the United States happen through private agreements with online platforms. YouTube’s ContentID system already existed in 2012, but the importance of that tool and others like it has increased immensely in the years since. The result is a landscape of platforms that do what Professor Annemarie Bridy has called “DMCA-plus enforcement,” extending the effective contours of copyright without a change in the law.

If there is an upside to this arrangement, it has been that actual copyright law discussions have had the heat turned down slightly, and may have become less of a fact-free zone. It’s hard to play out the counterfactual, but I think the right-to-repair movement and the Music Modernization Act have been beneficiaries of this change.

Second, and perhaps more nefariously, copyright proposals that had been proxies for regulating online speech more broadly have migrated to other areas of the law. Most notably in the past decade, these attacks have focused on section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. In some cases, the overlap is almost comical, like when op-eds pushing for changes cite the wrong law, and the New York Times has to issue a correction. In other moments the effect is more depressing. Watching FOSTA/SESTA skate through to passage, despite all the organizing against it, was a low point for online speech.

In my work with journalists today, copyright continues to be a chokepoint for silencing unfavorable reporting, but it is only one arrow in the quiver of would-be censors. We see police officers attempting to limit the distribution of their statements by playing mainstream music in the background, or right-wing activists issuing takedowns for newsworthy photographs documenting their associations, but we also see frivolous SLAPP suits by elected officials, a dramatic rise in arrests and assaults on journalists, and existential legal threats to entire outlets.

The overwhelming majority of people who are passionate about freedom of expression and access to knowledge online aren’t paid to work on those issues. I have been very lucky that, since 2011 I have been able to focus on these important topics as my job, first at the Electronic Frontier Foundation as a copyright activist, and now as the director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. SOPA was among the very first issues I worked on in this field, and I’ve carried its lessons through the decade of activism that I’ve been fortunate enough to participate in.

Parker Higgins is the director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. From 2011 to 2017, he worked on the activism team at the Electronic Frontier Foundation on copyright and speech issues.

This Techdirt Greenhouse special edition is all about the 10 year anniversary of the fight that stopped SOPA. On January 26th at 1pm PT, we'll be hosting a live discussion with Rep. Zoe Lofgren and some open roundtable discussions about the legacy of that fight. Please register to attend.

Filed Under: activism, copyright, free speech, sopa

Demanding Progress: From Aaron Swartz To SOPA And Beyond

from the foundations-of-activism dept

It’s a great irony — and an awkward thing to admit — that I’m not sure if the organization of which I’m executive director, Demand Progress, would exist but for SOPA and PIPA (or really their progenitor, COICA).

This month marks not just the 10th anniversary of the SOPA blackout, but also the 9th anniversary of the passing of my partner in the effort to get Demand Progress up and running, Aaron Swartz. Aaron took his own life while facing charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for allegedly downloading too many articles from the JSTOR academic cataloging service — to which he had a subscription — using MIT’s open network. We hope the organization still upholds the values that governed his work — and he certainly serves as an inspiration for so much of what we do. 

Aaron was several years younger than me, but we came to activism from similar perspectives — more or less unreconstructed utilitarianism — and first connected during my unsuccessful campaign for Congress in 2010. A few days after the primary we launched our first couple of online campaigns as Demand Progress, which was originally intended to be a multi-issue progressive populist concern. 

While Aaron is above all else remembered for his advocacy for an open internet and intellectual property reform, his priorities increasingly included contesting concentrated corporate power, implementing a more equitable vision for our economy, and opposing war-making. Some observers this fall noted the continued resonance of his final tweet — an entreaty to Treasury to mint a $1 trillion coin as a solution to a debt ceiling impasse.

But a second irony attendant to our founding is that, as we sought to identify a base of activists to support this progressive populist vision, Aaron was promptly pulled back into the firmament of online rights and IP activism. A petition we put forth in opposition to COICA gained hundreds of thousands of signers over a few days, demonstrating a certain void in the online campaigning ecosystem and imbuing the new organization with a sense of purpose — and providing a base of activists we could organize to make a difference. 

Everything Demand Progress has become since was built on that foundation. 

Over the course of the next year or so we worked together to build a movement to use the open architecture of the internet to save the open architecture of the internet. Aaron had a much more intuitive sense than I did of how to activate and harness the potential energy of online networks. 

My time in politics, starting before MySpace went online, had been shaped by a more traditional conception of political organizing - tactics like knocking on doors and phone banking. But my contribution was that I understood the legislative process and had a sense of what politicians recognize as demonstrations of power.

As time passed, kindred spirits — most notably Fight for the Future — emerged. Policy groups — Public Knowledge and EFF also come to mind, but there were many organizations that undertook the often unsung work of engaging with hundreds of Congressional staffers to attune them to the details of our coalition’s concerns.

It all culminated in the “blackout” of which others here have written: countless thousands of sites and users each serving as beacons, alerting their combined networks of tens of millions of people to the threat at hand, urging them to make their voices heard, and providing them the tools with which to do so. Is it cringey to say that it kind of felt transcendent? Well, it did. 

Idealism about the internet’s potential can seem quaint today — even to me — but for most who took part, the SOPA effort was a demonstration of a fundamental, visceral human yearning to connect with one another. You can watch a talk Aaron gave a few months later, where he discusses what all of this meant to him. 

We and our allies have wielded the tactics we learned and the relationships we built over the course of the SOPA campaign to agitate for other causes that have helped shape the workings of the internet — for instance in support of net neutrality and against mass surveillance.

Without them it’s unlikely that we’d have secured the strong net neutrality rules that were put in place in 2015 (with the explicit backing of millions of people) only to be repealed by the Trump administration a couple years later (over the will of millions of people). We are likely on the cusp of a new proceeding to reinstitute net neutrality rules, which are overwhelmingly likely to pass because of those broad demonstrations of support — and stand a chance of being longer-lasting. 

My second-to-last in-person conversation with Aaron was about how we might fight against suspected abuses of the Patriot Act to spy on a vastly broader universe than was understood by the public — a case Edward Snowden would crack open just a few months later. Demand Progress’s research and lobbying efforts would eventually, during the spring of 2020, prove dispositive of the sunset of several Patriot Act provisions, including that under which the telephonic metadata collection that Snowden revealed was taking place. (Government surveillance practices remain opaque, and there’s every reason to assume nefarious behaviors continue under a variety of other real or imagined authorities.)

And in the years since SOPA, Demand Progress has become an organization with a modicum of influence on the national stage — and has even been able to take on that broader remit we envisioned upon our founding. 

Today we work not to just to help forward online rights, but also in support of expansive macroeconomic policy, against endless wars, and for regulation of concentrations of corporate power — inclusive of some of the major platforms that were allied with us during the SOPA effort, because we think reforms are needed to bring the internet back in line with a more ideal, horizontalist conception of what it could be.

The Demand Progress team and I are grateful to Techdirt for pulling together this retrospective and inviting us to participate, and for giving us the opportunity to reflect on that exciting and hopeful work so many of us undertook together a decade ago. We'd also like to acknowledge the many people and groups carrying forth causes that Aaron cared about — SecureDrop, CFAA reform, and public access to court records and scientific research, to name just a few.

Davd Segal is the executive director of Demand Progress and a non-residential fellow at Stanford's Center for Internet and Society. He is a former Rhode Island State Representative.

This Techdirt Greenhouse special edition is all about the 10 year anniversary of the fight that stopped SOPA. On January 26th at 1pm PT, we'll be hosting a live discussion with Rep. Zoe Lofgren and some open roundtable discussions about the legacy of that fight. Please register to attend.

Filed Under: aaron swartz, activism, cfaa, sopa, surveillance

Remembering The Fight Against SOPA 10 Years Later... And What It Means For Today

from the greenhouse-time dept

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As mentioned last week, today is the 10 year anniversary of the big "Internet Blackout Day" that effectively killed any forward momentum that the terrible copyright bills SOPA and PIPA had. Our new Greenhouse panel is going to be all about that, with plenty of folks who were there looking back at what happened -- and also what it means for things moving forward.

But I wanted to highlight a few things from that experience that still stick with me today. The first bit was that the fight against SOPA only worked because it was joined by a very diverse group -- including some old-timers who had fought many, many battles against the draconian and anti-public expansion of copyright law. Those old timers were useful in that they knew the system and they knew the process, and understood the political levers. But -- and this is the important part -- they had basically lost every battle on copyright going back decades and they came into the fight with a kind of resolution that this battle would be lost as well. No one ever said this, but in talking to them, the mood was very much: "We'll fight, and make a lot of noise, but in the end we'll lose, because we always lose."

What was different was that others joined in on the fight, and many of them were politically naïve, but had a really strong conviction that SOPA could not be allowed to pass. I don't think they ever thought it was even possible that the bill would become law, and because of their involvement, and the people they activated, SOPA was actually stopped.

The very first meeting that I was aware of involving a bunch of the different activists looking to stop SOPA, it was the folks at Fight for the Future (calling in from Massachusetts to a meeting held at Mozilla) who suggested having an internet blackout (though this was targeted at the markup day in November, and was kind of a test run for what happened in January). People agreed -- and some pointed to a similar kind of blackout that was done back in the 90s, but I actually thought it was an awful idea. I thought that there was no way that enough people would care or do anything to make it matter. And, my fear was that if it fizzled, it would demonstrate how weak this coalition was, and how easy it would be to keep passing even worse legislation over and over again.

I was wrong. People did get energized and all sorts of people from all different backgrounds and viewpoints came together to speak up and make it clear -- loudly -- that this was not to be.

It actually wiped away much of a fairly thick layer of cynicism I had built up in watching the politics regarding policies that impact the internet. I -- like many people -- had come to believe that most of these bills are bought and sold by lobbyists and concern about the public is left aside. The reality, as I came to learn, is that while there are many bills that are passed cynically, the power of the public to speak out loudly and make change can and will outweigh the power of special interests. But, it's quite rare that that can happen. Most bills people don't have time to deal with, and most people live lives where they can't be expected to pay attention to everything that Congress does.

And, at the same time, we've seen this same kind of energy abused, with certain folks in the media getting people wrapped up in believing that this bill or that bill is bringing about the end of America or some such nonsense. We've seen a kind of reverse playbook on this with Section 230 -- in which people are being fed nonsense (from across the media) about how Section 230 is damaging "democracy" or "harming free speech" or other kinds of nonsense.

Another key point that I learned a decade ago, was that this was never about a single battle, but it is an unending fight. I was actually in the Capitol on the day of the blackout. I had come to Washington DC to attend the State of the Net conference, where I got to debate one of the key lobbyists for Hollywood on the importance (or not) of SOPA the day before the blackout. The next day I was wandering the halls of the Capitol, meeting with Senators, Representatives, staffers, whoever, and (this part was fun) hearing phones ring off the hook as people called in to protest SOPA.

However, the very next day, while I was waiting at Dulles for my flight back home, it was announced that (without SOPA) the DOJ had seized Megaupload and (with New Zealand law enforcement) had arrested Kim Dotcom and a bunch of other executives at the company. This was interesting and disturbing for a few reasons. First, Megaupload was held up as example numbers 1, 2, and 3 as to why SOPA was needed in the first place (somewhat mirroring, years later, the DOJ seizing Backpage.com days before FOSTA was signed, even as we were told FOSTA was needed to take down Backpage). We later learned many of the questionable things done in the Megaupload case that raised serious questions about the evidence in that case.

But the underlying issue was there. Even as the DOJ's indictment against Megaupload suggested that it was interpreting perfectly reasonable business and legal decisions as criminal, it showed that stopping SOPA would not stop terrible ideas around site blocking and site removals. Indeed, various pieces of SOPA and other kinds of attempts to give the government the power to shut down websites have continued to creep into various laws around the globe. And nowadays, even some of the people who fought against SOPA are supportive of some of those ideas.

I still think the real lesson of the fight was how bringing together different people with different perspectives -- but with a common interest in having an open and free internet -- can lead to amazing things. But I do wonder where that will take us now. The coalition that came together around SOPA easily fractured soon after. The differing goals and perspectives of those involved were unlikely to keep that kind of coalition together for long anyway. And various other campaigns tried to co-opt that effort -- usually without much luck.

However, I do still wonder if the next great aspects of building a better, more open internet are going to come from the same combination of different and unexpected forces. I see the seeds of this in some of the arguments we see today, whether it's about content moderation online, or even about things like DAOs, in which you have combinations of powerful legacy forces pushing in one direction, and then a variety of users -- some feeling strongly one way, and others feeling strongly another, arguing and fighting over how the internet should be. I'm still hoping that we'll see a new and interesting coalition emerge out of all this mess -- one that possibly includes a cynical old guard who knows why things won't work, combined with a more naïve new guard who insists it must work, and somehow finds a way to make it happen.

I wrote a little about this last summer in my Eternal October post. I think that there's a path forward, building on these lessons, figuring out how to build a better future internet -- not one dominated by legacy special interests, but one in which the people on the internet are the ones who control its future and can create something wonderful.

This Techdirt Greenhouse special edition is all about the 10 year anniversary of the fight that stopped SOPA. On January 26th at 1pm PT, we'll be hosting a live discussion with Rep. Zoe Lofgren and some open roundtable discussions about the legacy of that fight. Please register to attend.

Filed Under: activism, copyright, free speech, site blocking, sopa