Punit Shah

SOPA & PIPA Blackout Day: Why We’re Not Fighting for Enough Today

The tech industry is in legislative reaction mode today with blackouts to protest the current assault on free speech and a free internet. The protests are working in the short term, but we’re not asking enough of the public. We should be pushing for a new agenda and terms of debate on internet law, that is taking a preemptive rather than reactionary legislative strategy. Protest pages should be asking people to not only call Congress to kill SOPA/PIPA, but also to support the more fundamental principles like net neutrality and freedom of speech online through a tech industry-sponsored legislation that preempts legislative opponents from starting these frivolous debates again.

Why?

1) First, this is the legislative strategy of the people promoting these bills that will severely hurt the tech industry and all consumers of the user-contributed internet. SOPA and PIPA were bills proposed and heralded through by the recording industry and similar allies. In recent months, companies like AT&T and Verizon have pushed the FCC and Congress to pass legislation to curtail full net neutrality without provocation. In short, they were setting the legislative agenda, not the reactionary agenda. Taking the first shot puts the first move in better control of the public and legislative conversations and starting point for all legislative negotiations.

2) Second, we had a huge mindshare and coordinated support of the tech world today. If we had paired the anti-SOPA/PIPA message with a larger message on how to move forward on the larger issues of net neutrality and preserving freedom of expression and innovation online, we would have helped created a legal framework for tech companies for year to come. They would be able to invest in R&D with certainty of payoff for both consumers and investors. They would have been able to prevent distractions from emerging every few months when RIAA or Verizon push forward another half-baked and fully-damaging piece of legislation forward.

Unfortunately, after today media attention will drastically fall on the topic of internet law and in just a few weeks public momentum and interest in internet law will wane. Tech companies full-on commitment to another SOPA/PIPA-scale blackout or protest will be lower for a future legislative push in the short term. In short, we lost an opportunity to fully harness the current coordination between companies and public anti-SOPA/PIPA momentum to move towards a more secure future for American tech innovation that would benefit both consumers and the industry.

Yes, the tech industry does have an alternative bill to counter SOPA/PIPA: the OPEN Act. It helps solve the problems with SOPA/PIPA while offering a legitimate means to combat the true problem of online piracy. However this bill is ultimately a reaction to SOPA/PIPA even if it aims to re-align the debate. It also fails to create a more fundamental legal frameworks that the tech industry needs to maintain innovation potential; that wasn’t the point of the OPEN Act, which is why it should have been paired with more preemptory legislation.

At the risk of having this post labelled as just a critique without a means forward, I offer two specific points on how to move forward:

1) What specific pieces must be included in this bill to create an innovation framework for the tech industry and consumers?  I think there is large agreement within the tech industry that the internet must remain a “generative” platform (yes, I’m ripping this idea from Jonathan Zittrain in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It). Net neutrality is one example of a feature of the internet that maintains innovation from both big and small players on the platform. At the risk of inserting this post in a whole separate series of debates beyond SOPA/PIPA, I will wait for another post to outline the specific of this legislation. But if anyone thinks it is hard to come to a consensus for an industry-sponsored bill, then even the current reactionary tech industry legislative strategy will fail; you have to know what you want before you enter the legislative process. The tech industry can, and should, come to a consensus on what it wants and then write this up into a bill.

2) We’ve lost the opportunity to use the SOPA/PIPA Blackout Day to push forward more constructive, preemptory legislation for the tech industry, but we certainly haven’t lost every opportunity. We must use the current momentum and media attention to push this message. We must start today if we want to use our current public position to most aid the future of the consumer base and industry. All future public messaging on SOPA/PIPA must be co-messaged with this new broader forward-looking message. Tech CEOs and entrepreneurs need to start giving interviews to mainstream publications to push this additional agenda item. And we must not relent the public messaging until not only SOPA/PIPA are killed, but also we pass more preemptive legislation on internet law.