When The Noise Gets Louder Than The Money: Online and IRL, Anti-Censorship Protests Are Really Raising Hell

For a protest that was supposed to make its point by making the Internet a much quieter place, there was certainly a lot more noise than usual during Wednesday’s anti-censorship web blackout, both online and IRL. The ruckus, as you should probably know by now, was over SOPA and PIPA, two very nasty bills going through Congress that represent the latest efforts of the entertainment industry to de-fang and leash the Internet for its own personal gain.

• See also, SOPA Backers Are Pirates Themselves

Things were looking pretty grim up until last Friday, when public outrage and a statement from the Obama administration forced the bills’ authors to shelve controversial DNS-blocking provisions and pledge to reform many parts of the over-broad legislation. But on Wednesday, with Wikipedia and other essential sites going completely dark and Google directing its users to online petitions and contact forms, it became difficult to hear anything over the deafening censorship klaxons that seemed to be ringing out across the web.

The temporary death of Wikipedia, for obvious reasons, seemed to draw a majority of the attention. A twitter account, @herpderpedia, began retweeting droves of clueless students baffled at their sudden inability to do their research papers. On the other hand, it also hinted that, perhaps, all the noise about PIPA and SOPA up to now had just been reflections in the Reddit echo chamber. Nevertheless, the word was out, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore as the hours went by.

In addition to the hundreds of thousands of sites going dark on the web, protests were cropping up in the real world, too. In New York, a crowd of around 1,000 — mostly members of the city’s tech community — rallied outside the offices of Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillebrand, both PIPA supporters, demanding from inside the inevitable NYPD ‘protest cages’ that the senators reverse their position and work for the well-being of the tech industry and our Constitutional rights online.

A similar gathering in web-savvy San Francisco attracted internet luminaries like Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and celebrities like M.C. Hammer. Meanwhile, more protests sprouted up in Las Vegas and Seattle.

Many of SOPA and PIPA’s biggest backers were quick to react, attempting to belittle the protests by framing them as unsolicited belligerence. MPAA Chairman and CEO Chris Dodd, who now oversees a $100 million lobbying budget despite having pledged to never accept lobbyist money in his past life as a U.S. senator, called the web blackout a “‘Dangerous’ gimmick” which seeks to “punish elected and administration officials who are working diligently to protect American jobs from foreign criminals.” In addition to sidestepping the bill’s actual effects on jobs (it will kill them), what Dodd’s tantrum fails to acknowledge is that the internet doesn’t belong to the MPAA or the U.S. government — a hard truth that sits at the core of why Old Media incumbents are trying so desperately to wrangle it.

Of course, the most important reactions were elicited from those who had yet to take a stance. In this sense, the protests most certainly delivered: Links on Google’s landing page pointed users to an online petition that had 4.5 million signatures by day’s end, and participating sites across the net drove so many people to contact their representatives that many offices seemed to be choking on the sheer volume of phone calls, emails and faxes.

Web searches for info on the two bills also spiked. Here’s Google’s stats for both (as seen on The Atlantic):

In just 24 hours, the number of senators opposing PIPA rose from 5 to 35. The total number of lawmakers standing against both bills shot up to 105 (holding steady at 122 at the time of this writing). A good number of them jumped in from across the aisle, too: On Tuesday, 80 lawmakers publicly supported the bills. Now the number has shrunk to 65.

Indeed, one of the best parts of protests like these is observing the crazy things that public pressure can do to peoples’ convictions. Hours before the blackout began, Microsoft turned around and announced that they oppose SOPA in its current form. Other Johnny Come-Latelys like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who announced his opposition mid-day on Wednesday after the tide seemed to be turning, will certainly be appreciated for their support right now. But some critics, like GigaOm’s Om Malik, would agree it’s probably worth calling them out on it — all of their actions, or lack thereof, are being diligently recorded, after all.

Seeing the power of the united internet is no doubt an encouraging event for those fighting to keep cyberspace open and democratic. But just as in the past, any celebration should be kept brief and focused on the long road ahead. Ex-lobbyist T.C. Sottek writes on The Verge that ultimately, it will be his former colleagues who decide the fate of legislation like SOPA and PIPA. “As long as the entertainment industry spends more money in Washington than the tech industry,” he reminds us, “bad laws like SOPA and PIPA will appear with frightening regularity.”

Wednesday’s events were historic, without a doubt the single most effective day of protest in Internet history. But it’s important to recognize what actually happened that caused so many members of Congress to jump ship: The noise got louder than the money.

The money still exists though. Hollywood and the entertainment industry spent upwards of $200 million to push these bills through before anyone noticed, and there’s a lot more where that came from. The Internet can’t deliver miracles annually, and the only way to stop legislation like this from rearing its ugly head ever again is to change the law to stop monied interests from being able to call the shots.

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