Jan 2012 An new form of dissent: SOPA
If you think of all of the types of civil dissent — marches, protests, sit-ins, occupies — this one is a new one for the mix. Given the mess of a piece of legislation going through Congress, it is great to see the tech and internet industry mobilize a bit.
Self induced denial of service?
It is clearly effective since every major media outlet has picked up the story and generally put in on page 1, err, the homepage, err, the top of their feed. Given how easy it is to contact your members of congress online, it isn’t surprising a change to Tumbler resulted in 80,000 calls to representatives. Be interesting to see wikipedia’s response rates.
Of course as a reader of Cory Doctorow and supporter of the Electronic Freedom Foundation, it has to be said the issue is a complicated on. Forcing DNS edits, allowing persecution of host sites and removing of links definitely seems like classic bad work in Congress.
And just at a time when the industry is making buying videos and magazines easy enough to provide real revenue and the ad industry is getting organized to turn the digital pennies everyone is complaining about into digital dollars that can support publishers as well as independent artists.
