Facebook, Youtube, Limewire – add the name Megaupload to the list of websites that feel “threatened” by a government crackdown. Last month, Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom was arrested in New Zealand on “charges of racketeering, money laundering and copyright crimes.” The popular sharing site for pirated materials was a multi-million dollar enterprise for Dotcom and his associates.
Senator Patrick Leahy and Congressman Lamar Smith must be rolling in their sleep. As the authors of PIPA and SOPA, these are the kinds of internet crimes that give them nightmares.
The question is: can they do anything about it? The fall of Dotcom may just be a minor kink in the Internet giant. Leahy and Smith are two people. The Internet is two billion people. The numbers are overwhelming.
And if the past few weeks have taught us anything, it’s that you don’t mess with the two billion. In the days before a vote on the PIPA and SOPA bills, companies like Wikipedia and Google staged a silent protest on the web. They restricted access, blacked-out logos, and released “educational” videos describing how Washington was threatening the everyday Internet user. People listened, contacting their representatives and sharply tilting popular opinion against the two bills. It’s time for a re-write.
Propaganda has a negative connotation nowadays, but the Internet’s own experiment with it was remarkably successful. It epitomizes the transformation of the Internet into a political tool. No longer is the web just a place for doing research and checking emails. It’s now an interest group, and the most powerful one of its kind. The Internet is a continuation of the project that Gutenberg started over 500 years ago, and it has the awesome power to change world-wide currents of thought and information. It reaches every corner of the globe, and can aggregate data in ways that no other medium can ever achieve.
But the internet is more than just data. It’s people, and it’s their goals and ideas that make the Internet a medium for change. Its influence has already been felt in certain parts of the world. Social media helped facilitate political change during the Arab Spring, and protests in England and Chile are popularized online. Now the wave has hit the United States, and it should hardly be a surprise.
It will be interesting to see how the government responds to the rise of this interest group. It’s unlike anything they’ve seen before. There are no dressed-up lobbyists representing clients in headquarters with four walls and three-letter acronyms. Instead, it’s CEOs in t-shirts and sneakers, gathering an army of students, soccer-moms, and that guy that lives in his mom’s basement. It’s the revenge of the nerds, times one hundred.
The game has changed. There’s more pressure on Washington to not overstep its bounds. Act aggressively, and the Internet will respond in kind. But a balance must be found. Crooks must be arrested. Kim Dotcom cannot hide forever in his million-dollar mansion in New Zealand. At the same time, politicians must carefully word their laws and regulations to make sure that the big guys on top of the cyber-world don’t feel violated.
Even if the laws are pretty clear, Mark Zuckerberg and Jimmy Wales can easily mold words into weapons of political power. The Internet is trying to protect its ideas, and websites are worth millions. And let’s be honest – have interest groups ever been the most honest organizations in the first place? They don’t take any chances.
The odds are pretty good, too. Real sharks like Dotcom will lose a battle once in a while. But with a team of two billion followers, I don’t think the Internet can ever lose the war.
