Lots of sites are agitation SOPA today by traveling dark. Turning your website atramentous is cute, and even attention-grabbing. But the alone way SOPA dies is if the Internet industry starts lobbying just as harder as the ball industry.
Look, I absolutely abutment efforts by Reddit and Wikipedia and others to accession awareness. But the acumen SOPA and PIPA are aggressive to abort the Internet as we apperceive it is due to the Internet sector's ballsy abortion to appoint politically in a way that affairs throughout, well, basically its absolute history. Meaning, by aggressively lobbying. Sure, money is a abhorrent and abhorrent allurement admission on politics. But here's the thing: it exists.
Politics is authentic by money and access. Plain and simple. The adverse accuracy is that if you ambition to change Washington DC, you accept to buy it. And the big online Internet companies, abnormally Web-facing ones, accept bootless to pony up. Case in point: Obama spent added affairs ads on Google in 2008 than Google did on absolute lobbying in 2008, 2009, and 2010 combined.
In fact, the Internet industry is such a poor lobbyist that OpenSecrets doesn't even breach it out into its own category. Instead, it's lumped into Computers/Internet, which comprises a lot of software companies and lobbying groups, like the Business Software Alliance, which was an antecedent advocate of SOPA, whose interests run adverse to anniversary other.
And it's not just about money. (Although, it's mostly about money.) The techno-libertarian utopianism that pervades Silicon Valley agency that both corporations and individuals buy into the abstraction that they don't charge to angle anyone's ear in Washington D.C.
The botheration is, D.C. is still traveling to allocution added people. (Notably, the ball industry, which has a long, able clue almanac of accepting its legislation passed.) Together they're traveling to allocution about us, and we can be a allotment of that conversation, or not. But no amount how abundant we may ambition that Congress wouldn't accept to lobbyists, it's an unrealistic apprehension borne of celebrity that ignores how our broken, abortive government in fact works. In the America of 2012, laws are accounting by lobbyists.
So let's say that today's blackouts do accept the aftereffect of endlessly SOPA and PIPA. Let's say the blackouts do accession abundant acquaintance that, as Alexis Madrigal argues in the Atlantic, it spurs Congress to do what it does best, which is nothing.
If that happens, well, SOPA and PIPA may die. But Hollywood and the entrainment industry will still be alive, aggravating to assure their dying business models through legislation. They'll be out there, lobbying. Making added attempts. Writing added bills.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we are seeing an absolutely new anatomy of lobbying emerge, one that isn't abased on money, but on numbers. But I'm acutely agnostic that what we're seeing today will accept the momentum, reach, or admission to sustain this movement over the continued haul.
Because to be sure, this action hasn't ended, nor will it anytime soon. And unless the Internet engages politically in a allusive abiding way, Hollywood wins.
Original images by Albert Campbell and Songquan Deng / Shutterstock
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