The Agreement That Wanted to Own the Internet
Somewhere between SOPA dying and the champagne going flat, the lobbyists had already moved on to the next draft. That’s how it works: you defeat one acronym and another appears, slightly reworded, same sponsors. ACTA—Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement—had been in the works for years, negotiated almost entirely in secret by EU government representatives and media industry lobbyists who’ve always believed that everyone online is essentially a small criminal they haven’t caught yet.
The mechanics are straightforward and genuinely awful. Under ACTA, internet service providers would become liable for copyright violations committed by their users. Which means ISPs would be forced to monitor traffic, log what gets downloaded and shared, and report violations to rights holders—because no company wants to pay fines for what its customers do. Your own provider becomes the surveillance arm of the entertainment industry. Not a court. Not the police. A corporate entity motivated entirely by avoiding liability.
And "violation" has a definition wide enough to swallow the entire participatory internet. A quote from a novel in a blog post. The background track in a birthday video. A film clip in a meme. The kind of creative borrowing that forms the basic texture of online culture—all of it potentially actionable. Platforms like YouTube couldn’t function under these conditions. Neither could anything else built on user-generated content that borrows from existing culture. The remix internet would simply stop being legally possible.
What makes ACTA harder to fight than a domestic bill is the jurisdiction. It’s a trade agreement, which means it sits outside the normal legislative process in most countries. Parliamentary review comes late, if at all. The people in those closed-door sessions weren’t elected; the media conglomerates they represented certainly weren’t. By the time the public knows enough to push back, the framework is already semi-binding. That’s not an accident. That’s the design.
There’s a version of this argument that sounds like paranoia—shadowy industry forces secretly rewriting the rules of the internet, coordinated across continents. The problem is that it’s accurate. The same organizations that funded SOPA funded the lobbying effort behind ACTA. The same legal theory underlies both: that the internet’s problem is the people using it, and the solution is to make those people easier to punish.
What I actually care about isn’t piracy in the abstract. It’s that anti-piracy legislation consistently uses piracy as the wedge and then expands outward to cover things that have nothing to do with it—free speech, anonymity, the right to quote and criticize and build on existing culture. The internet is the only medium that has ever genuinely democratized those things, and that democratization is apparently intolerable to the people who controlled what came before it.
In early 2012 the protests were real and the anger was specific. People who had actually read what was in the agreement, not just reacting to a vague sense of threat. Whether that would be enough was the question no one could answer yet. But the fact that ordinary people across European cities were in the streets about a trade agreement negotiated in secret by lobbyists—that was something worth paying attention to.