How Close We Came
SOPA was the Stop Online Piracy Act, which sounds like something that should exist, until you read what it actually did. A congressman named Lamar S. Smith had written this proposal that would let the US government block websites, remove them from search engines, cut off their ad revenue, and make them inaccessible to Americans—not just the piracy sites, but anything that contained even one piece of copyrighted material someone decided was illegally uploaded. YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr, Reddit, Wikipedia. Any site where users could post content. All of it would be on the table.
The proposal came from the usual place: the MPAA, the RIAA, the entertainment industry people who’d been terrified of the internet since they realized they couldn’t control it. They kept trying. Every few years, a new law, a new way to lock things down tighter. SOPA was just the most obvious middle finger they’d thrown at how the internet actually worked, which is to say, freely.
I remember reading the details and feeling something between resignation and disgust. There was this predictable quality to it, like watching someone try the same thing over and over expecting different results. The copyright holders saw piracy as an existential threat, and their solution was to break the internet itself. If one person uploaded something illegal, the entire site got blacklisted. That was the proposal. That’s how little these people understood what they were trying to regulate.
What mattered was that some people actually understood what would happen if it passed. Google, Facebook, Sony, even some of the big companies that had reason to care about copyright, they all said no. The blackout on January 18th, 2012—Wikipedia going dark, Reddit, Mozilla—it made people pay attention. Even Obama said he’d veto it. And it died.
But the whole thing stayed with me because it showed how easy it would be. How close we came to having the whole internet restructured around fear of liability. Every site owner would’ve had to police every upload, every comment, every link. The internet would’ve become this timid, sterile thing. I’d still have been able to use it, but it would’ve been gutted from the inside. Neutered by lawyers and fear.
That never happened. But it could’ve. And there’s always another version of the same idea waiting in the wings.