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. "While the federal government does have a role in protecting intellectual property rights, it should do so in a way that does not weaken internet security, disrupt growth or restrict free speech rights," Heritage wrote.

Unfortunately, liberal politicians could not rely on analytical support from progressives. The Center for American Progress did not take an official position on the bills. Blogging at ThinkProgress, Alyssa Rosenberg explained that “CAP doesn't have a position on either of these bills, since we don't have an internet policy or an intellectual property policy shop” and later wrote, “I obviously think it would be dandy for us to have the funding to do such things.”

Would support from progressive technology policy analysts have had an impact on the way that Democrats reacted to the web blackout? The Democratic Party has a close relationship with SOPA and PIPA supporters at the Motion Picture Association of America, and so does the Center for American Progress, who invited MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd to speak in favor of the bills at their offices in December. These strong relationships might have resulted in progressive advocacy in favor of the bills, and helped to cement the support they’ve received from Democratic politicians.

However, it is the responsibility of political leadership to find tactful ways to temper the more extreme desires of their supporters with a dose of practical reality. There are flaws with these bills from the standpoint of proper crafting that ought to be apparent to objective analysts regardless of where one sits on the political questions.

The initial drafts of these bills required Internet Service Providers to implement website blocks using the DNS protocol. This prompted a long and unnecessary debate about the technical feasibility of this very specific implementation approach. The laws of the United States should rarely, if ever, directly dictate the specific technical implementations of desired policy. Technology changes quickly. Implementations that are practical and useful today may become totally obsolete tomorrow. Legislative mandates regarding specific implementation details introduce a brittleness that prevents technical progress and adaptation.

Federal laws should state the functional requirements that Congress agrees upon, and leave the implementation details to the engineers, or if necessary, federal regulatory bodies who can rapidly adapt their interpretations to changing circumstances. This much should be obvious to any professional technology policy analyst, and the fact that the bills required the use of a specific Internet protocol should have stood out as a red flag indicating that the authors of these bills may not understand the proper approach to crafting federal technology policy and may have made other errors as well.

One of the most important errors that people have made in considering these issues is to frame them as a dialog between two different sets of corporate lobbyists. As Representative Zoe Lofgren told the New York Times “This is way beyond that. This is individual citizens rising up.” People who are unfamiliar with Internet communities may fail to perceive the distinction between the interests and advocacy of the companies that run those communities and the interests and advocacy of the individual people who participate in them.

For example, the 1,800 editors of Wikipedia who participated in the deliberation over whether or not their website should join the protest come from all walks of life and all professions. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that covers a wide variety of subjects. Most of people who contribute content to it are volunteers. Their press release announcing participation in the protest stated that “This is by far the largest level of participation in a community discussion ever seen on Wikipedia, which illustrates the level of concern that Wikipedians feel about this proposed legislation.” It is not appropriate to simply characterize these people as members of the “tech industry” who are involved in the debate in order to protect their economic interests. Something far more vital is happening here.

Ultimately, the failure of Democrats to recognize both the political and technical problems with these bills left the party vulnerable, and Republicans were able to take advantage of that vulnerability to score a political victory. Democrats might not have been so blindsided if the progressive activists that many of them turn to for guidance were paying more attention to technology policy debates, like their conservative counterparts.

On the day of the protests there was a demonstration in New York City outside the offices of Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand. One of the protestors held up a sign that read “It’s no longer OK to NOT know how the Internet works.” This should not be interpreted merely as a political demand. It is a practical reality. It is no longer OK for the flagship progressive policy think tank to not have anyone working on technology policy. These are not niche issues anymore. They concern the entire progressive community.