How to Lose an Internet War
The internet runs on two tracks simultaneously. On one side: cat photos, personal essays, pornography. On the other: a permanent war against governments, corporations, and whichever body decided this week to make the open web a little smaller. That war isn’t only fought by anonymous hackers in dim cafés—it’s fought by ordinary people who figured out, somewhere along the way, that they could push back.
We’ve marched against surveillance laws. We laughed ACTA off the table. We made Joseph Kony briefly famous on every continent at once. When the moment has a shape and a face and a video, we show up. Some of us even go outside.
But a petition against the proposed link tax—a law that would let publishers charge search engines for linking to their content—died quietly this month without coming close to the signatures needed. The Pirate Party filed it. A journalist at Zeit argued that partisan association was partly to blame: any initiative filed under a party banner carries that party’s baggage, even for a sympathetic cause. There’s something to that. But I think the real problem is simpler and sadder. Nobody knows what a link tax is. And the name sounds like it might actually be a good thing.
Get out your pitchforks. Put them back. That’s basically the whole story.
KONY 2012 worked—at least for the forty-eight hours before the questions started—because a man with a face was doing things to children, and a video made sharing it feel like a blow against him. ACTA worked because someone convinced the internet that forwarding a recipe could get your door kicked in. Music rights organizations blocking YouTube videos became culturally monstrous because the consequence is immediate: you click play, nothing happens, and someone has to answer for it. Right or wrong, those campaigns had a legible villain and a consequence that felt personal. The link tax has neither. Publishers want search engines to pay a licensing fee for linking to their articles. Proponents say aggregators profit from journalism they didn’t create. Opponents say the indexing sends traffic—and ad revenue—directly back to publishers, and that any licensing regime would crush smaller search tools that can’t afford to pay. If you made it to the end of that sentence without switching to something else, congratulations. You’re already in the minority this campaign will ever reach.
Nobody’s blocked video gets unblocked when the petition wins. Nobody can brag about it over drinks. We killed the link tax.
Great, can you install my printer driver now?
There’s no enemy you can put a face on—is it the search engines? The government? Some newspaper executive nobody’s heard of? And there was no campaign to speak of. No video, no slogan, no shared image to belong to. A few tweets went out from prominent tech commentators, got retweeted by people who already agreed, and dissolved into the feed within the hour. That isn’t organizing. It’s mutual reassurance dressed up as activism.
What makes this worse is exhaustion. Every week something new is on fire—another proposed law, another rights grab, another platform update that quietly removes something you cared about. The problems change names but never resolve, and slowly, collectively, people start running triage. Most of us want to watch whatever video is circulating this week without first sitting through a lecture about who’s blocking it and why. Eventually the pitchforks stay in the cabinet. We make our peace with the idea that someone else will sort it out.
The link tax will probably pass. The damage will be diffuse: a few fewer search alternatives, a bit more consolidation, a slightly less open web. Nothing that lands in one moment you can point at. Nothing that makes a good video. The lesson—frustrating as it is—is that rightness doesn’t propagate itself. You need narrative. You need an enemy with a face and a problem with stakes that feel now rather than eventually. You need something that makes people feel like they belong to the fight. A well-intentioned petition filed in the right place, promoted by the right accounts, in language only specialists can parse, isn’t enough anymore. Maybe it never was. The next challenge is already forming somewhere, and whoever wants to win it needs to make the thing that makes people feel the thing. Everything else is just preaching to whoever stayed in the room.