On January 18, 2012, a series of coordinated protests occurred against two proposed laws in the United States Congress—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). These followed smaller protests in late 2011. Protests were based on concerns that the bills, intended to provide more robust responses to copyright infringement (also known as piracy) arising outside the United States, contained measures that could possibly infringe online freedom of speech, websites, and Internet communities. Protesters also argued that there were insufficient safeguards in place to protect sites based upon user-generated content.
The move to a formal protest was initiated when Fight for the Future organized thousands of the most popular websites in the world, including the English Wikipedia, to temporarily close or interrupt their content and redirect users to a message opposing the proposed legislation. Websites such as Google, Reddit, Mozilla, and Flickr soon featured protests against the acts. Some shut down completely, while others kept some or all of their content accessible. According to Fight for the Future, more than 115,000 websites joined the Internet protest. In addition to the online protests, there were simultaneous physical demonstrations in several U.S. cities, including New York City, San Francisco and Seattle, and separately during December 2011 a mass boycott of then-supporter GoDaddy. The protests were reported globally.
The January protest, initially planned to coincide with the first SOPA hearing of the year, drew publicity and reaction. Days prior to the action, the White House issued a statement that it would "not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet". On January 18, 2012, itself, more than 8 million people looked up their representative on Wikipedia, 3 million people emailed Congress to express opposition to the bills, more than 1 million messages were sent to Congress through the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online petition at Google recorded over 4.5 million signatures, Twitter recorded at least 2.4 million SOPA-related tweets, and lawmakers collected "more than 14 million names—more than 10 million of them voters—who contacted them to protest" the bills.
During and after the January protest, a number of politicians who had previously supported the bills expressed concerns with the proposals in their existing form, while others withdrew their support entirely. Internationally, "scathing" criticism of the bills was voiced from World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, as well as the European Commissioner for Digital and Frontier Technologies. Some observers were critical of the tactics used; the Boston Herald described the service withdrawals as evidence of "how very powerful these cyber-bullies can be". Motion Picture Association Chairman Chris Dodd stated that the coordinated shutdown was "an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today". Others such as The New York Times saw the protests as "a political coming of age for the tech industry".
By January 20, 2012, the political environment regarding both bills had shifted significantly. The bills were removed from further voting, ostensibly to be revised to take into consideration the issues raised, but according to The New York Times, it was probably "shelved" following a "flight away from the bill". Opponents of the bills noted that they had been "indefinitely postponed" but cautioned that they were "not dead" and "[would] return".
Background
Background to bills
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) are bills that were introduced into the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate in the last quarter of 2011. Both are responses to the problem of enforcement of U.S. laws against websites outside U.S. jurisdiction. While the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other existing laws have generally been considered effective against illegal content or activities on U.S.-based sites, action is more difficult against overseas websites. SOPA and PIPA proposed to rectify this by cutting off infringing sites from their U.S.-based funding (particularly advertising), payment processors, appearances on search engines, and visibility on web browsers, instead. Major providers of all these services are predominantly U.S.-based. Notably, the provisions also involved modifying the Domain Name System, a crucial service that underpins the entire Internet and allows computers to locate each other reliably around the world.
Supporters included, but were not limited to, media companies and industry associations such as the Motion Picture Association, the Recording Industry Association of America and the Entertainment Software Association. Supporters generally identified a need to have more effective laws to combat the illegal domestic sales of products and services, the counterfeiting and sale of products (such as prescription drugs, athletic shoes, and cosmetics), and worldwide copyright infringing activities which were problematic to prevent inasmuch as they originated outside the United States.
Those opposed included a mixture of technology and Internet firms and associations, content creators such as the Wikipedia community, free software authors, free speech organizations, lawmakers, and other websites and organizations, as well as members of the public using their services. They generally identified two main areas of severe side-effects: (1) effects on Internet websites, communities and user-generated content, and (2) effects on critically fundamental internet architecture and security:
- Effects on websites, web communities and user-generated content – The scope, language, definitions, procedures, remedies, and provision for immunity following wrongful allegations was seen as insufficiently narrow and well-defined. Legal analysts suggested that draconian court orders could be obtained without undue difficulty to "take down" an entire site, without dialog or notification, due process, or liability for compensation if incorrect, even if the site were legitimate. Perceived consequences included serious undermining of free speech on the Internet, devastation of the Internet's communities, and widespread closure and chilling of websites, particularly those including user-created content or organizations such as libraries providing reference information. Observers also noted the laws could be used strategically against legitimate competitors or during elections.
- Effects on critical Internet architecture – Technical experts testified that the proposed DNS measures conflicted with the fundamental basis of the Internet and would "break" ongoing attempts to make the net more secure against malicious use.
Google's policy director, Bob Boorstin, stated that a site like YouTube supporting user-generated content "would just go dark immediately" to comply with the legislation. Tumblr, one of the first websites active in grassroots activism against the bills, added a feature that "censored" its website on November 16, 2011, and the social media aggregator Reddit also became deeply involved.
Legislative and protest timeline
On November 16, 2011, a first hearing by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee was marked by online protests involving blackened website banners, popularly described as "American Censorship Day".
On December 15, 2011, the first House Judiciary Committee mark-up hearing took place for SOPA, prior to its eventual move to the House floor. During the markup session, several proposed amendments to address technological and other concerns were defeated. The mark-up process was put on hold to be resumed after the new year.
Around this time, numerous websites began displaying banners and messages promoting their readerships to contact Congress to stop the progress of the bill, and some websites began to discuss or endorse a possible "Internet blackout" before any vote on SOPA in the House, as a means of further protest. Reddit was the first major site to announce an "Internet blackout" for January 18, 2012, and several other sites shortly followed, coordinating actions for that day.
A notable political response to the November 2011 protests was the outlining in early December of a bipartisan third, alternative, bill with the support of technology companies such as Google and Facebook, which unusually had been posted on the Internet to allow public comment and suggestions in light of the widespread protests related to the SOPA and PIPA bills. It was formally introduced as the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act in the Senate on December 17 by Senator Ron Wyden, and, in the House on January 18, by Representative Darrell Issa. It proposed placing enforcement in the hands of the United States International Trade Commission, keeping provisions that targeted payments and advertising for infringing websites, and tightly targeted wording to avoid many other key areas of concern with SOPA and PIPA.
Online discussions of a blackout and concerns over the bills continued unabated after the markup hearing and increased in prominence. On January 11, 2012, Senator Patrick Leahy, the main sponsor for PIPA, said of the DNS filtering provision, "I will therefore propose that the positive and negative effects of this provision be studied before implemented", reported by some papers as removal of those provisions. Opposers deemed this a tactical withdrawal allowing reintroduction at a later stage and ignoring other concerns as well as provisions in PIPA, and evidence that the bill had not been understood or checked by its own creators and that proposals for a blackout were gaining impact. Momentum for the protests continued unchanged since the bills had merely been postponed, and due to their other contentious provisions.
Protests of November 16, 2011 ("American Censorship Day")
On November 16, 2011, SOPA was discussed by the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary. Tumblr, Mozilla, Techdirt, and the Center for Democracy and Technology were among many Internet companies who protested by participating in "American Censorship Day", by displaying black banners over their site logos with the words "Stop Censorship" in all caps.
December 2011 boycott of GoDaddy
On December 22, 2011, users at Reddit proposed a boycott and a public day for switching away from then–SOPA supporter GoDaddy, the largest ICANN-accredited registrar in the world, known as Move Your Domain Day. The date was later set as December 29, 2011.
Popular websites that moved domains included Imgur, the Wikimedia Foundation, and I Can Has Cheezburger?—which stated it would remove over 1,000 domains from GoDaddy if they continued their support of SOPA.
On December 23, 2011, GoDaddy withdrew its support for SOPA, releasing a statement saying "GoDaddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it". CEO Warren Adelman stated when asked, that he couldn't commit to changing GoDaddy's position on the record in Congress, but said "I'll take that back to our legislative guys, but I agree that's an important step", when pressed, he said "We're going to step back and let others take leadership roles". Further outrage was due to the fact that many Internet sites would be subject to shutdowns under SOPA, but GoDaddy was in a narrow class of exempted businesses that would have immunity, whereas many other domain operators would not.
On December 26, 2011, a Google bomb was started against GoDaddy to remove them from the No. 1 place on Google for the term "Domain Registration" in retaliation for supporting SOPA. This was then disseminated through Hacker News. Reddit users noted that by December 22, 2011, SOPA supporters were discovering the backlash that could arise from ignoring social media users.
Reports up to December 29, 2011, described GoDaddy as "hemorrhaging" customers. On December 25, 2011, (Christmas Day) GoDaddy lost a net 16,191 domains as a result of the boycott. However, on December 29, 2011, itself, GoDaddy gained a net of 20,748 domains, twice as many as it lost that day, attributed by Techdirt to a number of causes, in particular customers having moved early, and an appeased customer response to their change of position over SOPA.
Protests of January 18, 2012
Protestors
On December 10, 2011, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales drew attention to concerns over SOPA, which he described as a "much worse law" than the DDL intercettazioni (Wiretapping Bill) in Italy some months earlier, and which was being fast-tracked through the United States Congress under a "misleading title". He stated he was attending high-level meetings on this, and wanted to gauge the sense of the English Wikipedia community on the issue, and specifically on the question of a blackout similar to that held successfully in October 2011 by Italian Wikipedia editors over the proposed media censorship law in that country:
I thought this would be a good time to take a quick reading of the community feeling on this issue. To be clear, this is NOT a vote on whether or not to have a strike. This is merely a straw poll to indicate overall interest. If this poll is firmly "opposed" then I'll know that now. But even if this poll is firmly in "support" we'd obviously go through a much longer process to get some kind of consensus around parameters, triggers, and timing.
Following initial informal discussions which resulted in a positive response, a formal consultation titled "SOPA Initiative" was opened by the community to consider specific proposals and preferred options. These included matters such as location (United States only or worldwide), and whether content should be disabled completely or still accessible after a click-through page. Eventually, the discussion led to a decision strongly in favor of a 24-hour global blackout of the site on January 18, 2012, disabling normal reading and editing functions, affirmed in a vote of approximately 1,800 editors. The blocking action was purposely not complete; users could access Wikipedia content from the mobile interface or mirror sites, or if they disabled JavaScript or other web browser functions. Within hours of the start of the blackout, many websites posted instructions for disabling the banner, by altering URLs, using browser add-ons such as Adblock Plus or Greasemonkey, or interrupting the page from loading completely.
The vote formally affected the English Wikipedia only, other language editions and Wikimedia projects were left free to decide whether to hold their own protests given the potential worldwide impact of the legislation, with technical support on offer from the Foundation.
On January 17, 2012, Jimmy Wales affirmed the results of the community's decision and that the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts the English Wikipedia website, would support the community's decision. He called for a "public uprising" against the proposed legislation, which critics feared would threaten free speech. He added that factors such as funding or donations had not been part of the community's considerations, but the matter had arisen as "a principled stand" from the community, and that in his view "our best long-term prospect for Wikipedia in terms of our survival... depends on us being principled". He commented on editors' reasons for the decision: