Is Facebook Selling Out The Internet?

from the what's-up-zuck? dept

In newspapers across the country today, a who's who of massively successful entrepreneurs are asking Congress not to pass SOPA or PROTECT IP. On the list of people signing:

• Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, Opsware, and Andreessen Horowitz
• Mitchell Baker, co-founder of Mozilla Firefox
• Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google
• Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and Square
• Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and Hunch
• David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo
• Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn
• Arianna Huffington, co-founder of the Huffington Post
• Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube
• Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive
• Elon Musk, co-founder of Paypal, Tesla and SpaceX
• Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist
• Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay
• Biz Stone, co-founder of Obvious and Twitter
• Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and Wikimedia
• Evan Williams, co-founder of Blogger and Twitter
• Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo

Basically, if you spend time on the internet, you probably spend an awful lot of time on sites that these people created. And all of them are worried enough about SOPA and PROTECT IP that they've put out this letter, and placed it in newspapers across the country. It's clearly a serious concern.

That said, there is one name that's oddly missing: Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook did already come out against the bill, but Mark's name is not on here. Given the list of other names on here, there's no doubt he was asked, but for whatever reasons has chosen not to speak out. In asking around, it appears that he made the decision not to stick his neck out on this one, even as the company agrees that SOPA is bad.

I think this is a huge mistake, and that Mark has underestimated both how much this law will impact Facebook (and how much Facebook relies on the current safe harbors of the DMCA), as well as the sentiment of Facebook users against this bill. My Facebook account is flooded with anti-SOPA talk today -- and not from "the usual" people. I tend to use Facebook more for personal stuff than work stuff, so I'm pretty amazed at all sorts of people I'd never even expect to know about SOPA speaking out on Facebook about it.

It seems that, at the very least, Zuckerberg should be in front of this and leading the way. I realize that the Facebook executive team has become very image conscious about taking political stands, but this one is an easy call. This bill would hurt Facebook and hurt its users. All these other companies are speaking up and speaking out. Every one of the people you'd put together on a list of top internet entrepreneurs is on this list... except Zuckerberg. So, what's up, Zuck? Don't you care about the internet?

Filed Under: copyright, craig newmark, evan williams, marc andreessen, mark zuckerberg, pipa, protect ip, sergey brin, sopa
Companies: facebook