Ok, seriously, enough. SOPA isn't going to collapse in on itself if GoDaddy comes out swinging against it. This reminds me of the phrase "security theater" as applied to the TSA. This is "activism theater" -- it accomplishes nothing but it puts on a show and makes people feel better.
Applying this pressure to your congressmen is the only real way to affect change. I've called each of mine and have the vapid "We're studying this closely" response letters to prove it. I agree that action against individual companies can be effective, but there is an extreme focus on GoDaddy like they're the linchpin of this whole thing, some kind of mob boss when they're just another company who has lent their weight to this legislation.
"Applying this pressure to your congressmen is the only real way to affect change"
is followed by
"I've called each of mine and have the vapid response letters to prove it."
Slight disconnect there? =)
Don't mean to harp on it, because contacting your congresscritters is a genuinely productive way to enact change. (Just don't put a whole lot of effort writing a heartfelt argument informed with evidence and rigor--its value comes more from indicating to the politician the breadth and energy of opposition to SOPA.)
But focusing on GoDaddy isn't a distraction, either. One of the central rules of political organizing is this: you pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Victory isn't going to come in one fell swoop: if it comes at all, it will be through a loosely connected series of small victories, looking plausible only in retrospect.
GoDaddy is an easy enemy: it has an anti-charismatic founder who has a long history of general shittiness. A victory there doesn't only screw over GoDaddy, which is in the grand scheme of things not even a secondary target--its only actual goal is to make a quick buck from the feds. But what a victory does do is this: for one, it sends an obvious message to Congress and to other companies that the Internet matters: it's providing objective information that, yes, the anti-SOPA forces have some power, and other players might re-evaluate their current strategy to accomodate that new information.
But beyond that, and more important than that, is that it builds the movement. A victory sends a signal to people who are anti-SOPA but disenchanted that there is at least the hope of victory, bringing them back into the fold. It generates a bunch of news articles providing valuable anti-SOPA publicity, which is especially valuable since broader public knowledge of SOPA is one of the things we need most now. And it develops commitment and better engagement for the movement via showing how each of us as individuals can contribute to change.
It's not an either-or choice: you can both send letters and move your domains from GoDaddy.
By the way, if you're reading this and you haven't sent a letter... close out this window immediately, write a letter, and send it.
Please don't write a letter. It accomplishes nothing.
We need to call our congressman and speak to whomever is on the line, with our voices. Not pens or keyboards.
When your congressman asks his staff "What have the public been calling about?" (which he asks regularly), then there's a good chance that SOPA will be mentioned.
from speaking to staffers (i live in the DC area). They are generally young 20-somethings whose job it is to answer the phones, tally the e-mails & letters, and report on it to the congresscritters; they are generally unanimous on a few points:
1) that the congresspeople care and notice if an issue is getting a lot of attention from constituents
2) that this is something they usually ask about every day
3) that phone calls are generally more influential than letters, which are generally more influential than e-mails -- but it depends on how each office handles their inbounds.
Besides, "On the Internet", GoDaddy is a more relevant target than the US government.
If the US Government wants to censor the internet, I can do nothing - I don't live there. However, if GoDaddy wants to censor the internet, I can move my domains away.
The issue here in this particular article is that GoDaddy lied about an issue that people are passionate enough to vote with their wallets about. It also doesn't accomplish nothing - it's better than a petition, which costs the petitioners nothing and is generally ignored in politics. It's a real demonstration of groundswell sentiment.
It also makes other companies recognize that we don't like to be fucked with and we vote with our wallets too. Today Godaddy, tomorrow your company supporting SOPA?
There was one fellow on IRC that was suggesting a campaign to unlike SOPA supporting companies on Facebook. My response was similar to yours – it'd be utterly useless (as is the majority of "internet activism").
However, once thinking along those lines, I suggested what might not be useless would be using the Reddit-ish sentiment to raise money for an advertising campaign targeted specifically at the home districts of the bill's sponsors (which would be easy on Facebook). I'd suspect it'd be easy to scrape together many thousands of dollars and then to smear the bill's sponsors in their home districts.
(I haven't done this because honestly I haven't read a single page of the bill's text, don't even know what its implications are and refuse to protest something on a bandwagon.)
I completely disagree. Watching a big proponent of SOPA have to scurry away from its position with its tail between its legs very likely gets the attention of people in Washington.
As a Democrat, I feel there is way too much Outrage over all kinds of relatively minor things. If you read a site like Daily Kos and see all the action going on there, it would seem that any successful legislator would have to necessarily build a tolerance to negative emails/letters/calls.
There are not, however, many issues that cause a large corporate donor to beg for mercy and forgiveness for taking a certain position. I think this action towards GoDaddy matters quite a bit in separating SOPA as something that really, truly angers people.
>> If you read a site like Daily Kos and see all the action going on there, it would seem that any successful legislator would have to necessarily build a tolerance to negative emails/letters/calls.
I wonder if calling/sending letters to media outlets like WashPost and NY times might be more effective than doing the same for legislators. Right now, coverage of SOPA/PIPA is completely lacking among big media outlets. Negative coverage of the bills could go a long way towards defeating the bills. The tricky thing is that a lot of the big media outlets are owned by companies who are few of the major supporters of SOPA/PIPA in the first place.
Wrong. It clearly has had an effect, even if it hasn't changed go daddy's actual position. There has been a huge backlash against them, it has focused SOPA opposition, and created a lot of news, which is what we need.
Suggesting we should only do one thing is foolish.
I get a sense that it's the opposite: your emails to your congresspeople fall on deaf ears while some of these grassroots picking on companies is resonating.
Please don't write an email or a letter; as you say, it accomplishes nothing.
We need to call our congressman and speak to whomever is on the line, with our voices. Not pens or keyboards.
When your congressman asks his staff "What have the public been calling about?" (which he asks regularly), then there's a good chance that SOPA will be mentioned.
You're right. Though, look at it this way: this is a battle in the war against SOPA and a victory here does help get people who are standing at the bylines get motivated enough to take action.
While boycotting companies supporting SOPA is important, I feel the excessive focus on GoDaddy is distracting the community from the important issue of actually defeating SOPA/PIPA. The tech community really does not have the size and influence to be able to force even a fifth of the companies to withdraw their support of SOPA.
The overwhelming majority of the effort should be going to calling/sending (physical) letters to one's respective representatives, maybe setting up some sort of a fund to oppose SOPA/PIPA, urging tech companies like Google to spend more on lobbying (They can and should be spending more to lobby against the act), etc.
Edit: I was under the incorrect impression that OPEN act would end nonsense like SOPA/PIPA. Edited comment to reflect that.
People, and movements, need victories. GoDaddy may not be anything close to the final blow against this nonsense, but that isn't important.
Here's the thing: it's the week of Christmas. People, including elected officials and their constituents, are traveling and distracted. The likelihood of a letter-writing campaign either getting off the ground of making an impressive impact is much slimmer than usual.
Meanwhile, a very particular company is identified as supportive of the legislation. It happens that their product is broadly used by the Internet community and that said product provides recurring revenue. The loss of numerous customers, as a result, has lasting impact.
And so the community responds and makes an example of this company. Do angels sing, heralding the end of bad legislation? No. But tech news outlets, which would have had nothing substantial to print, now get to focus their full attention again on SOPA, on how a company who supports it is brutally punished, and how the Internet business community is maybe something not to be fucked with after all. So now this is part of the story: Internet folk have teeth, there are consequences for supporting bad law. The best part is that GoDaddy doesn't even have to be wounded in any real sense – the story is enough to change the tone of the conversation. This is mostly a war of perceptions, so it's good to make the bad guys look like scheming clowns.
This strikes me as an incredible deal during an otherwise dead week. What would you have preferred in its place? How would the season impact such a proposal?
> The overwhelming majority of the effort should be going to calling/sending (physical) letters to one's respective representatives, maybe setting up some sort of a fund to oppose SOPA/PIPA and support the OPEN act, urging tech companies like Google to spend more on lobbying (They can and should be spending more to lobby against the act), etc
I'm sure you don't need me to point out the multitude of wonderful, free publishing platforms you're going to be able to use to make your case for just this course of action. Meanwhile, while you're putting that all together, let's see a little gratitude for the good luck of GoDaddy's incompetence and for the time and money spent by the many domain holders who made their point so clearly.
This is gonna be hard. We, the people, are way outgunned in terms of cash and lobbying. We need every victory we can get to keep the logs rolling.
Putting pressure on one company indirectly puts pressure on many however.
Other companies that see, "Oh shit, GoDaddy has had nearly 40,000 domains transferred and more bad PR than they can handle, maybe we shouldn't be supporting this. What if that shit hits the fan for us too?"
Making an example out of one can't be a bad thing.
What evidence do you have that the number of letters has been negatively affected by the GoDaddy coverage?
This GoDaddy coverage has been perfect. If anything, more people know about SOPA than would have done otherwise. If anything, the number of letters being sent will have increased, not decreased.
I don't mean to imply that the number of letters has decreased. But if the majority of the community chatter is about boycotting GoDaddy, then that will decrease the focus on other (much much much more important) parts of the campaign which could have a negative effect.
For instance, people may think that they've done their part by boycotting GoDaddy.
It also focusses attention only on SOPA when PIPA is almost as bad.
There is a halo effect. Attention on SOPA increases attention on PIPA. Without the SOPA scandal, this halo effect and increased on attention on PIPA may never have happened. You can't simply convert emotion from one object to the other. I think it's better to support things that are in the same direction than to nitpick the details (eg. pick your battles).
I think making an example out of Godaddy for companies who support SOPA, is a good way to get others to quit and deter them from supporting such bills in the future. The worse it gets for Godaddy (say it ends up causing it to go bankrupt as a long term effect) the more chilling the effect will be for everyone else.
Probably also interacts with a lot of pre-existing dislike of GoDaddy; they're not exactly a previously-loved company that just did something to anger people for the first time.
Your post advocates that we don't act on the grounds that we should act. Silly.
Advocacy often falls into the trap of trying to act uniformly, as if there is only one appropriate action for an individual of a movement to take.
One individual does not have the capacity to decide those battles which should be fought and those battles from which we should gracefully withdraw.
This is, in fact, because every battle that we have the present capacity to fight ought be undertaken:
Unless, of course, there is only one battle upon which the war depends. But this is not so currently; your own multitude of (in my experience, only marginally important) battlefields demonstrates this.
According to Namecheap customer service, GoDaddy is blocking whois requests, forcing whois information to be entered manually. Due to the large number of recent domain transfers, this is slowing down the transfer rate.
.com domains appear to be blocked, but not .me domains.
(Asking some random questions into the aether in the hope that someone knowledgeable might answer ;P.) So, how does one register "official congressional support" for something? (As in: how did companies get on this list in the first place? Is that just a list of entities who have contributed money to the committee somehow?) Is there a way to register congressional "dissupport"? (Why is there no equivalent list of "dissupporters" for this bill? Is it common practice to only list supporters?)
What can we do against ADOBE, Apple, Microsoft and Visa who are also pro SOPA. When companies start feeling the pain, they will soon withdraw their support.
What makes you think Apple and Microsoft are pro-SOPA? They were part of an industry group that was pro-SOPA until an uproar a few months ago for the group to pull out.
Unfortunately I don't think the Godaddy situation proves much of anything to other companies because Godaddy is so easy to boycott. Transferring a domain will cost you some fees, but it is relatively painless, you can get the same exact service from someone else with ease.
Are the people who turned their back on Godaddy as likely to not buy the next big Nintendo game if they are Nintendo fans?
I'm pretty skeptical that a godaddy style boycott will work on a company whose good/service is not so easily replaceable.
Nothing speakers louder than the dollar. Bitching and moaning really does nothing compared to the mighty dollar. Fortunately for me I own a small hosting company with roughly 1500 or so domain names that I will do a bulk transfer too after the xmas holiday. These are domain names I mainly control as a consultant for other companies (my clients)... This ought to get interesting when I begin pulling the trigger. About 6 years ago I did something similar to move away from NetSol and they attempted to block this; making it very difficult to close my accounts.
SOPA is dead, this story will continue by itself. People who want to move domains certainly should, but I think it behooves freedom to focus on PIPA now.
No, I'm not. SOPA failure and existing critiques can be incorporated into PIPA ones. Focus on PIPA, keep both in the news. The critiques will synergize, which I don't mean in the dack.com way.
According to my research it isn't quite clear that Microsoft strongly supports SOPA. They seemed to be indirectly backing it via BSA, but there are some stories of MS opposing it as well.
Might be a case of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing.
Applying this pressure to your congressmen is the only real way to affect change. I've called each of mine and have the vapid "We're studying this closely" response letters to prove it. I agree that action against individual companies can be effective, but there is an extreme focus on GoDaddy like they're the linchpin of this whole thing, some kind of mob boss when they're just another company who has lent their weight to this legislation.