The Men Who Want to Fix the Internet
Every few years, a coalition of confused lobbyists, copyright lawyers who haven’t used the internet since 2004, and politicians who still send faxes decides to fix the web. The fix always looks the same: a law that would have made complete sense in 1998, applied to something it was never designed to touch, pushed through a legislature that doesn’t understand the difference between a hyperlink and a torrent.
In early 2019, the threat was Article 13 of the EU Copyright Directive—what critics more accurately called an upload filter mandate. The mechanism was simple in theory and catastrophic in practice: platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and SoundCloud would be required to scan all user-uploaded content for copyright violations before it went live. Anything that triggered the filter would be blocked automatically. No appeal, no nuance, no understanding that a song playing faintly in the background of a home video is not piracy.
Critics pointed out what should have been obvious: automated content filters are inaccurate, easy to abuse, and trivially weaponizable by governments or corporations against voices they find inconvenient. Remixes, parodies, reaction videos, memes, a ten-second clip with the wrong song playing behind it—all gone. The filter doesn’t know what satire is. Markus Reuter at netzpolitik.org argued at the time that petitions were no longer enough—five million signatures hadn’t moved anything—and that only street-level protest could stop it. The comparable fight against ACTA years earlier had been won in the streets across Europe. This one needed the same energy.
The human face of Article 13 was CDU politician Axel Voss, who championed the directive with the particular confidence of someone who doesn’t use the tools he’s regulating. While pushing for automated copyright enforcement across the continent, his own Facebook page was in violation of copyright law. The irony was perfect and changed nothing.
This is the consistent texture of these fights: the people designing the rules have no working knowledge of the systems they’re reshaping, and the people who understand those systems have no power in the rooms where the decisions get made. What Article 13 would have ended—practically and culturally—wasn’t piracy. It was the internet as a space where someone can take something and do something new with it. The remix. The commentary. The whole productive mess of things that makes the web feel like it belongs to more than one person.
The Save Your Internet campaign ran hard through early 2019. The vote happened anyway.