Websites Flex Political Power by Going Dark

Some firms say they are risking profits to send Congress a message
By: Reyhan Harmanci

For a popular — or even an unpopular — website, there is no greater fear than going dark.

But late Tuesday night, thousands of organizations and companies began blocking all or part of their websites to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), a pair of federal anti-piracy bills being debated in Congress.

Well-known Bay Area-based organizations like the Internet Archive, Wikipedia, BoingBoing, MoveOn.org and O’Reilly Media, took part in the boycott, which they say could bring significant losses in revenue, contributions or traffic — or all three.

A handful of tech giants, such as Google, Mozilla and Twitter, stayed online, but offered anti-SOPA messages on their sites. Craigslist took a similar step.

Even cat videos and literary journals are part of the rebellion. McSweeneys.net, the site for Dave Eggers' local publishing house, promised to go dark and the I Can Haz Cheezburger network of sites planned to post a stark anti-SOPA message on an opening screen, without denying users access to the rest of the site.

The move, says site founder Ben Huh, could end up costing tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

Denying or restricting access to websites has been used by governments as a tactic to stifle public demonstrations, but this is the first time that so many high-profile sites have worked together to flex their political power. Anti-SOPA activists say that flipping the script is the appropriate way to rally against what they consider to be oppressive legislation.

“We’ve never done anything like this before,” said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, an S.F.-based nonprofit that gets around 2.5 million hits a day.

Technically, he said, publishing a page about SOPA in place of normal content is “relatively easy, which is a little scary.”

“It shows how interdependent we all are, how fragile the whole Internet’s infrastructure is,” he said. “In some ways, that’s the point.”

Kahle also plans to speak at a protest at San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza on Wednesday at noon, along with venture capital investor Ron Conway.

Supporters of SOPA, which include the film and music industry lobbies and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, blasted plans by sites like Wikipedia, the fifth most-visited site in the U.S., to shutdown.

“It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users and arm them with misinformation,” Jonathan Lamy, spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America, told Politico. “It’s time for the stunts to end and those who claim to care about rogue website theft to back up their rhetoric and work with us on meaningful solutions.”

Even groups participating in the protest acknowledge that going offline or restricting entry to a site is a risky move.

“It’s a really great idea, but kind of crazy,” said Garlin Gilcrest II, national campaign director of MoveOn.org, a progressive activist organization, “We decided to go big, all in.”

“The blackout is an extreme step,” said Trevor Timm, an activist and writer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to online freedom. “The sites who are participating are those whose very existence is threatened. That’s the only reason they are taking this action.”

Debate about SOPA, and its Senate cousin, PIPA, has been percolating in Web circles for months. The bills aim to reduce digital piracy through a number of broad changes in the enforcement of copyright protection. Currently, the bills would require online service providers, Internet search engines, payment providers and Internet advertising services to police their customers. Companies that did not comply with the government’s order to prevent customers from pirating copyrighted materials would be punished.

The language of the legislation is in flux, as congressional staffers make changes to the Senate and House versions of the bills. Neither measure has come to a floor vote yet. Over the weekend, the White House released a statement broadly condemning “legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet,” a message many interpreted to mean that President Obama wants lawmakers to go back to the drawing board.

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Supporters of SOPA say new laws are needed to fight online trafficking in copyrighted materials and counterfeit goods. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the House Judiciary Committee Chairman who sponsored SOPA, says the proposed law will stop foreign criminals from stealing and selling America’s intellectual property online and keeping the profits for themselves.

"The criticism of this bill is completely hypothetical; none of it is based in reality," Smith told Roll Call recently. "Not one of the critics was able to point to any language in the bill that would in any way harm the Internet. Their accusations are simply not supported by any facts."

But SOPA opponents like Timm from the EFF hotly dispute that characterization, saying that the bills pose a threat to freedom of expression online. He did add, however, that a blackout of Web pages isn’t the right form of protest for every company.

“What’s great about the Wikipedia blackout is that they get close to 25 million hits a day, and a lot of users might not be familiar with SOPA,” said Timm. But for EFF, he added, the goal is to “amplify the message” by hosting a petition drive on the site. The EFF logo also will be darkened in observance of the boycott. 

Huh echoed the EFF's stance, saying he wanted the Cheezburger community to "talk about censorship."

But others found fault with the extreme action. Dick Constolo, the CEO of Twitter, this weekend criticized Wikipedia’s decision to go offline as “foolish,” promising that his media company would strike some other public pose against the legislation. (“Watch this space,” he tweeted.) And the Associated Press reported that volunteer editors at Wikipedia also are unhappy with the decision to go dark.

At O’Reilly Media, a publisher of technology and business books, a blackout is “the right thing to do, ” according to Allen Noren, the company’s vice president of online marketing. But the decision came with technical challenges and potential losses.

While O’Reilly has “a long history activism and protest online,” said Noren, they have never pulled the plug on their own website. It took a team of more than a dozen employees a week to prepare to take the company offline. The resulting blackout could hurt their ranking with Google, he said.

“I think the people who are going dark realize that if we don't protest now, we might not have another opportunity to do so,” Noren said, “At least, now, we’re in charge.”

Peter Lewis contributed reporting.