If there was a political victor in the January 18th Internet Blackout to protest SOPA and PIPA, it was certainly the Republican Party. On that day, thirteen Senators announced that they had dropped support for the bill. Eleven of them were Republicans. This fact was not lost on Internet activists. Markos "kos" Moulitsas, founder of the popular liberal blogging site Daily Kos, wrote an exasperated post titled “SOPA, and the idiocy of the Democrats” in which he said:

It's been a while since we've seen Democrats this tone deaf, this oblivious to political reality.

You have an entire wired generation focused on this issue like a laser, fighting like hell to protect their online freedoms, and it's F***ING REPUBLICANS who are playing the heroes by dropping support?

The January 18th protest, in which thousands of websites blacked out their content, has a historical precedent. On February 8th, 1996 thousands of websites turned their backgrounds black to protest President Bill Clinton’s signing of the Communications Decency Act or CDA. The CDA threatened tens of thousands of dollars in fines and federal prison sentences for anyone who used a swear word in a blog post. Indecent speech is the standard applied to broadcast television and radio, where similar utterances can provoke comparable fines.

Today, I think, most people have a good enough understanding of the Internet to realize how ludicrous this idea was, but in 1996, the CDA had strong bipartisan support. Supporters included many Democratic leaders such as Harry Reid and John F. Kerry. In spite of the outrage on the Internet, it is unlikely that these supporters faced any real political consequences. At the time, the number of people who participated in Internet communities was relatively small.

However, times have changed. The Internet has grown a great deal in 15 years and Internet communities play an important role in the lives of millions of Americans. During the January 18th protest more than one million messages were sent to Congress through the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s action center, and more than 4.5 million people signed Google’s petition against the bills. Wikipedia says that 126 million people viewed their blackout protest page. That is a significant reach that the web did not have back in 1996.

To these millions, the Republican Party has sent a clear message. A few days before the protest, California Republican Darrell Issa announced that “the voice of the Internet community has been heard.” The partisan imbalance of the vote changes paints a clear picture of who is listening to that voice, and who is not.

Support and analysis from conservative think tanks may be one reason that Republicans have been so responsive. Early on, analysts at the Cato Institute were critical of the bills. Later, the Heritage Foundation expressed its opposition and included the bills on its political scorecard. ... [ Read More (0.7k in body) ]