I disagree, the DMCA caused a huge outcry on the Internet of 14 years ago. It's just "the Internet" was much smaller. Much much much smaller. In 1998 my non-technical family had heard of the internet. In 2012 they live on it. It was slow, but the accumulated change has been enormous.
No, no, I expressed myself poorly. There was a huge outcry - on the Internet. It stopped on the Internet, too, and the DMCA passed with Washington entirely ignoring us. What's bowling me over is, yeah, the Internet's way bigger now. It's big enough we're actually getting noticed.
It's blowing my mind - similar to when I first saw a URL on a semi tractor trailer. It's one thing to know something's coming, and quite another to see it happen.
(Edited for italics. Is anybody else having real troubles with G+ and HNN having different markdown for italics?)
The internet is big, but please don't think for a moment that awareness of SOPA/PIPA is big at all . . . "normals" have absolutely zero clue about what it is . . . even many who aren't "normals" aren't aware.
As tech/internet professionals, we often forget the echo chamber we live in . . . we all read the same publications and participate in the same communities. Awareness/publication outside those communities is negligible. As an example, take a look at the blackoutsopa campaign on Twitter . . . 10,000 people (I'm one of them, by the way) out of 180 million on Twitter?? . . . the most recent claim I saw is that those 10,000 people have 20 million followers . . . in aggregate, sure . . . wouldn't be surprised if it was a net of only 1 million . . . if that.
That said, it's impressive that the anti-SOPA/PIPA campaign has had an outsized impact for its population, but there is a LONG way to go before the rest of the internet has even the slightest hint anything is even going on . . . and I do think FB/Google/Wiki/Tumblr blackouts would be needed to get there.
> "normals" have absolutely zero clue about what it is
I was surprised to hear my relatively non-technical father ask me back in December if SOPA was as bad as he had heard. Discussion of this legislation seems to be making it out into the mainstream press in bits and pieces. NPR has done several segments on it that I know of for instance.
