
What the first web blackout looked like, 17 years ago - sethbannon
http://old.cdt.org/speech/cda/960203_48hrs_alert.html
======
delinka
This was to protest President Clinton's signing of the Communications Decency
Act of 1996. The indecency provisions of the act were struck down by the
Supreme Court as unconstitutional the following year. Additional legal
challenges took ten more years to come to fruition. More detail welcome in the
comments on HN.

~~~
gojomo
A good place to learn more about this chapter of the battles for online free
speech is the Wikipedia article:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Decency_Act>

Well, except during the upcoming blackout period.

~~~
McP
Or, during the blackout period:
<http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Decency_Act>

~~~
valisystem
Or just press escape while the page is loading.

------
Tobu
The CDA was later struck down by the supreme court, thanks to a challenge by
the ACLU: <http://epic.org/free_speech/cda/>

~~~
r00fus
Keep in mind that was before the Roberts Supreme Court, who had just recently
declared Corporate Money == Speech (via Citizens United case).

If SOPA passes, I hold out very little hope that this Supreme Court will do
much of anything to ameliorate it .

~~~
jacoblyles
A court that takes a free speech absolutist position in one case is more
likely to protect other forms of speech, not less. I'm an extreme civil
libertarian and I strongly supported the Citizens United ruling.

~~~
gradschool
There's no constitutional reason that the bill of rights should extend
automatically to corporations (nor to robots or inanimate objects, for that
matter). I'd be suspicious of any court using a first amendment argument to
protect corporate interests.

~~~
dpatru
If I have free speech rights, and if you have free speech rights, why should
we not have free speech rights if we form a corporation and speak with one
(amplified) voice?

~~~
dodedo
Do you also believe that non-profits and churches should be able to freely
lobby? Currently both are severely curtailed in their political speech, unlike
for-profit corporations. This is why there are two ACLU organizations:
[http://www.aclu.org/american-civil-liberties-union-and-
aclu-...](http://www.aclu.org/american-civil-liberties-union-and-aclu-
foundation-what-difference)

------
joeyh
Ouch, I feel old now. Here's the .signature I used at the time, featuring an
encoded bit of anti-CDA, presumably illegal under CDA profanity.

    
    
        #!/usr/bin/perl -pl-                                     ,,ep) ayf >|)nj,,
        $_=reverse lc$_;s@"@''@g;y/[]{A-U}<>()a-y1-9,!.?`'/][} #         Joey Hess
        {><)(eq)paj6y!fk7wuodbjsfn^mxhl2Eh59L86`i'%,/;s@k@>|@g #  joey@kitenet.net
    
    

(Flips text upside down.. we didn't have unicode then..)

~~~
teeray
Yeah... who else thought, "Wow, 17 years ago... that was in the 80s" before
realizing that there was no web to black out then?

I feel like an old, old, man.

~~~
lsb
Seventeen years ago is 1995.

~~~
teeray
Indeed... my intention was to say that it _feels_ like seventeen years ago
should be in the 80s. Thanks for letting me know it didn't come across :-P

------
tristan_louis
As one of the participants, I remember this well. It was the first time there
was a major action from pretty much all large web sites on the internet.

iWorld (later known as internet.com) became part of the blackout and, at the
time, we were one of the most trafficked sites so it was a big deal to
convince the company that owned us (the company was Mecklermedia and was
publicly traded) that this was a good move and that it made sense.

The blackout the web day was not the end but the beginning of the fight over
the CDA. It eventually took some work but the challenge made it to the Supreme
Court (the case was called ACLU vs. Reno) and it helped expand first amendment
speech protection to the internet.

------
fkn
I was too young at the time to be aware of this blackout, but I am grateful to
the ones that protested this bill. The internet would not have been the same
if people are scared to express their ideas/opinions/arts.

I wonder about the world we would be in if the bill had passed as it was
presented.

~~~
gojomo
It did pass and was signed into law.

Through a combination of people ignoring it, and the Supreme Court eventually
knocking the worst part down, it wound up 'mostly harmless'.

Not every battle has to be won via a vote in the legislature.

~~~
tristan_louis
Part of the reason it passed is that it was an amendment to the
Telecommunications Reform Act, the biggest change in telecommunication
regulation in the last 1/2 century so no matter what we did, it was bound to
pass then.

Being involved in fighting it was a whole education in how Washington works
and part of the reason I suspect we're going to have to continue fighting
SOPA/PIPA for a long time to come, even if it's on the back burner right now.

------
bryanh
What I find most interesting is the line about knowing when to switch to
black: "You can also just watch CNN; they'll announce the signing of the
bill."

When was the last time you saw CNN covering bill signings?

------
lwhi
I remember placing a blue ribbon on my homepage, which was in response to this
act [1]. My 9600 baud modem wasn't on-line every day, I had to pester my
parents to be able to dial in - so I must have missed the black out.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ribbon_Online_Free_Speech_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ribbon_Online_Free_Speech_Campaign)

------
acknickulous
Oh my god--I remember this. It's biggest legacy was that a lot of people
realized they really liked black backgrounds on their web pages and left the
that way. A new era in front end design was born. (But they didn't call it
front end back then)

------
jordanb
One takeaway should be just how absurd the communications decency act seems
given the modern reality of the internet.

This was a law written by people profoundly out of touch with the way the
world was moving.

I think it should have lessons for our current struggle against the current
COPA and PIPA bills, which are campaigned for, drafted, and promoted by people
who have a similar disconnect with the future of information.

------
decklin
A post-mortem:
[http://web.archive.org/web/19980121045936/http://www.bababoo...](http://web.archive.org/web/19980121045936/http://www.bababooey.com/monkey/study.html)

------
kipsfi
The best part of this was the concept of banding together as group of
"thousands" in this blackout. As of 2007 (the latest numbers I could easily
find), Wikipedia as a whole has > 2500 views per second. Of course, the
English Wikipedia is the only one being blacked out as far as I know, but I
expect it also is a large portion of that 2500 views/second.

And that's just Wikipedia! Seems to me that a few more people will be affected
this time around.

------
the_paul
Er, 2012 - 1996 = 16, not 17?

I feel old already. I don't want to get charged for the extra year.

------
danyork
Wow... what a blast from the past! I remember that time period well when we
were all concerned about the CDA (and also the proposed Clipper Chip mandatory
encryption). Thanks for posting this link to the past...

~~~
adestefan
The Clipper Chip fiasco was mandatory key escrow.

------
AdamFernandez
It will be interesting to see the difference, in terms of impact, between a
blackout of the very nascent web of 1996 and of the very powerful web of 2012.

------
rometest
May be this is a dumb question, cant the universities participate in blackout?

~~~
nowarninglabel
For most public universities, I'm pretty sure it would be against the law to
willingly take down services. Of course, this doesn't mean students and
professors couldn't participate by taking down their sites or protesting.

~~~
onedognight
Here's John Baez doing just that. <http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/>

------
scelerat
Tangential, but I miss well-formatted monospace 80-column emails.

------
sethbannon
This was the first web blackout on record, taking place 17 years ago to
protest the Communications Decency Act.

------
noinput
great flashback, all it's missing is a few <blink>'s

~~~
jQueryIsAwesome
Or a big <marquee>; can you believe that it still works in Google Chrome? (but
still just as smooth)

~~~
tristan_louis
The <marquee> tag didn't exist yet :)

