 on March 17th, 2021. And I'm excited to welcome all of you to our second in the series of 20th anniversary public knowledge events. This one called The Untold Story of SOPA PIPPA. And we have a fantastic PK family group here to lead us through this conversation. If you don't know, the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act known as SOPA and PIPPA is one of the seminal major victories in the public knowledge history. And so I'm excited that we have this great group here to discuss it. I'll remind folks that this is an ongoing series that we started that you can find available on our YouTube channel. So please subscribe to the Public Knowledge YouTube channel and you can watch the ongoing series of Public Knowledge 20th anniversary events that we'll be doing all this year. So to lead us in this second event, I'm happy to welcome our moderator, former board member of Public Knowledge, the Senior Vice President for Government Affairs at the Consumer Technology Association, Michael Petriko. Michael, it's all yours. Thank you, Chris. So good afternoon and happy St. Patrick's Day. Michael Petriko from the Consumer Technology Association. Welcome to this panel on the Unknown Story of SOPA PIPPA. Now, you may be wondering, this is a discussion about a legislative fight that happened 10 years ago, which is ages in DC time. Why is this important or relevant? So here's why, because SOPA PIPPA was the first big advocacy fight, the Lexington and Concord of the Digital Age. Its reverberations are still being felt today. And it set the table for so many of the discussions about the role of technology, the balance of power between innovators and legacy industries, the need to preserve or control online speech that we are still talking about today, and Congress is still talking about today. So today we have a true rock star panel to tell you the SOPA PIPPA story. I'm going to introduce them. First, Mara Corbett, who at the time of SOPA PIPPA had just taken the daring step of founding the Glenn Echo Group, a tiny fledgling communications firm focused on the relatively new issue area of internet policy. 10 years later, she is still the head of the Glenn Echo Group, which is now a thriving, growing DC powerhouse. Laurent Crenshaw has a unique perspective. At the time of SOPA PIPPA, he was heading up tech policy with the legislative director, I believe, for Congressman Darrell Issa. And today he's heading tech policy for Patreon, a company whose existence would likely have not been possible if SOPA and PIPPA had become law. And finally, Ernesto Falcone, who led the battle against SOPA PIPPA for public knowledge and continues to lead the fight for free and open internet today, the senior legislative counsel for EFF. But first, we'll hear remarks from the Senate's foremost advocate for innovation, Senator Ron Wyden was one of the first on Capitol Hill to recognize the potential of the internet and the potential of harm from SOPA PIPPA. When it looked like its passage was assured, he came to CES and he gave a joint press conference with Congressman Issa and played a huge role in turning this issue around. 10 years later, he is still a powerful voice working nonstop to make sure consumers enjoy the full benefits of innovation. So with that, over to Senator Wyden. Thanks everybody for inviting me to say a few words. It seems like yesterday that we were all huddled around my office on Friday afternoons learning about how PIPPA and SOPA would break the internet and suppress free speech. Fridays were about organizing to save the internet. The deck we knew was stacked against us at first. But we had public knowledge and others on our side and we effectively beat the house and the Senate leaders had to pull the bill. Our efforts, culminating with the internet blackout, showed how powerful the grassroots activists can be. Concerns about SOPA were not only on the back page of the New York Times, but they also made it to the front page. We showed the DC establishment that when we're right, when we're organized and when we fight, we can win. SOPA wasn't just about one bill. The battle that we won changed the course of internet policy and IP throughout the US government. It doesn't mean that we're going to win every single effort, but we have more wins ahead of us to ensure that the internet continues to serve as a platform for speech that all of us value. Great. Thank you, Senator Wyden. That was terrific. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to do a discussion with our panel. And throughout the discussion, by using the question and answer button at the bottom of your screen, you can submit questions and then at 2.45, we'll begin taking the questions and then at 3 o'clock, we'll wrap up. So with that, let's begin. Again, Washington runs in dog years a decade ago. Seems like a long time. Let's start by level setting. Let me go to Ernesto. Ernesto, just what was SOPA PIPA and what would it do? What problem was it trying to solve? So the premise behind it was Piracy was running rampant. People, rights holder, namely the big legacy companies, weren't able to dictate how people use content on the internet. To kind of walk back what the internet was then, you definitely didn't have several streaming services of high-quality content. You had kind of the infancy of that. Netflix and Hulu were kind of the new things that were small. They weren't creating their own content. And the argument was we have to change the law. We have to kind of change how internet information travels as a means to combat piracy. And it was a lot of kind of these pipe dreams of if we just regulate how the pipes work well enough, we'll deter people from never thinking about piracy again. And a lot of kind of wishful thinking. And that culminated to a whole series of provisions within the Stop Piling Piracy Act, which would have blocked internet sites, which would have taken down tons of collateral damage to free speech on all sorts of places because of the sloppy way Congress envisioned how you would block things on the internet. And eventually kind of was the catalyst mode that led to eventually the blackout months later. Hey, Michael, you're muted. I think after all this time, I would have learned. Who were the stakeholders on both sides? And what were they trying to achieve? So I guess you had some major content companies and who else? Yeah, I know the drivers of these ideas of changing how the internet works as a distribution network, right? A costless open network that you can do kind of anything with. Your legacy companies are the movie industry, so MPAA, the recording industry, RIAA. And the opposition originally was kind of small but mighty. It was kind of the tech sector, which it's worth remembering the tech sector was not that big 10 years ago. They've grown substantially in those 10 years. But back then, they were kind of the active player always trying to avoid extinction through some sort of bad law or bad regulation. And consumer groups. And that was like the initial start. So consumer groups like public knowledge as well as brand new ones, which are more well known now like Fight for the Future and Demand Progress. And then that grew and grew by the day as the word got out about what Congress was contemplating. So by the end, you had well over 100 different kinds of organizations and groups that represent businesses all engaged. So you had startups form their own association. Then it's called Engine. We know about Engine now. This is like the first year then they were kind of formed in response to this. You had human rights groups that work on international human rights issues and envision if the United States took the policy of it's permissible to use domestic law to block access to the internet. What will China do with that permission? They will do exactly what they do now. And we will see the ground of anti censorship, which was promoted by the bond administration and primarily by Secretary Clinton and her internet freedom agenda. So kind of a wide range of players. And then kind of just your average user. Reddit, I would say the community of Reddit was a very powerful activist group of people who just care about technology, care about access to the internet, and we're all mobilized in that space. So let's switch focus to Capitol Hill. So Laurent, at that point, you're working for Congressman Issa. He was kind of a Paul Revere of the industry, right? He was sounding the call and demanding that everybody wake up. How do you get engaged? Sure. Great question, Michael. And also just want to say a quick hello to all of the participants who are on here. Looks like just based off of the attendees that we've got a lot of folks who were there for the battles as well. So it's good to have everyone on here. And so we can all sort of reflect back on this momentous event. So in regards to the Capitol Hill fight and Congressman Issa, you know, just to bring it all back together back in 2011, the big fight in the House of Representatives at that point for most of that year had actually been patent reform, the American Vents Act. That's what most of the technology industry, most of the House Judiciary Committee had generally been focused on. The Protect IP Act was actually introduced first over on the Senate side. And as it was moving through the chamber, Senator Wyden, as he sort of referenced in his remarks, early on, was one of the key stakeholders who put a hold on that piece of legislation on the Senate side as it was moving forward, which really helped to give us a bit of a longer window of time going into that summer to start to pay attention, to really start to notice what was happening with that piece of copyright legislation over there. Now, the reason I mentioned that is because the way that SOPA came about on the Senate on the House side was a little bit different. So we just finished patent reform. We knew that the House Judiciary Committee was working on a bill, on a piece of legislation that was going to be the counterpart to the Protect IP Act in the Senate. My office, I'd been asking the Judiciary Committee for weeks on in. Can I see it? Can we see a copy of this bill? We really, we know that this is an important issue and that, you know, the technology community, multiple communities at large are going to care about it. And so, finally, we got a copy of the bill, and this is in early September, 36 hours or so before the bill was set to be dropped. And it was shared with us only a paper copy at about 25% scale. So there were four pages on each individual page. So literally, I've got this 60-page bill in the office with the magnifying glass going through marking bits of it, and then having a conversation with Congressman Issa talking about the intricacies of it. And as we're going through the bill, and I'm explaining that there, you know, we've got a short turnaround window and I'm describing what's in it with every major point, you know, whether it was the ISP blocking, whether it was the DNS set controls, whether it was establishing an administrative procedure for basic, for copyright removals and basically an administrative court or numerous other requirements in there. We just kept on saying, this is bad. This is really bad. This isn't legislative language that is salvageable. It truly is something that could cause so much harm that it needs to be thrown out, if anything, rather than something that becomes law. So that was kind of the premise that we originally had. We shared our concerns with the Judiciary Committee, and we were currently told to basically stand aside because this bill was packaged, greased, and ready to slide right out of the halls of Congress and to become law. And, you know, that was how the committee treated the bill up and until the first markup, excuse me, the first congressional hearing. That hearing happened in November. Now along the way, there were a lot of moving pieces that were already occurring. We understood that this bill had many powerful backers behind it, whether it was the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whether it was the movie industry, whether it was the music industry, whether it was the National Association of Manufacturers and others who'd all been brought into this kind of industry coalition that was really trying to, you know, preserve their models, their market share that they were afraid that internet platforms and SOPA, excuse me, the internet platforms were disrupting. And so we, being Congressman Eisen and a few other key members, decided that not only were we going to oppose the legislation, that we had to come up with alternatives, better solutions, show both Congress and the general public that there were better ways to think about any type of potential online legislation, and also just that we're talking about internet bills, and these bills impact the public, so there should be some back and forth input as well. So we established a website that was up and running at that time called Keep the Web Open. We came up with an alternative bill called the Open Act, which it wasn't necessarily because we thought it was a perfect sort of construct or alternative, but at the same time, we needed to show that there were other ways of thinking about these solutions that could potentially cause less harm. We had a small group of members who were in opposition who were on the committee. It was Daryl Issa, it was Jason Shafitz, it was Jared Polis, and it was Zollofgren. Those were the four key stakeholders at the time who basically held the dam back to give the civil society groups, to give people at large, not for profits, and other organizations the necessary time to organize. And so during that window, we were saying inside of Congress, this is bad. I was talking to so many different industry groups that endorsed this legislation and trying to ask them to take a step back, to sign off, and they all said the same thing. This thing is greased. It's going to happen. You're just basically being a thorn in the side of progress, in essence, by trying to stop it from happening. So all of this leads up basically until the markup, which they scheduled in December. This markup was supposed to be the sort of crowning moment for the bill becoming or moving out of committee, passing out of the House, and ultimately seeing some variant of the two bills become long. And it was where we really had to stake our last stand as the opponents of this legislation. And so as a part of it, we did some things that normally in Congress you don't do on both sides of the aisle. Again, we had this small group. And so we made them read the bill in its entirety because we wanted people to understand it. This was a 68-page bill by the time it got there. And they had to read every word. We had 50-some amendments drawn up for it. We had a secondary letter going on where we were basically trying to get members to sign on to say, pause the hearing, have a separate hearing on the ramifications on SOPA PIPA, on DNS SAC, on cybersecurity infrastructure in the country and how it could potentially make more vulnerabilities. So we were working all of these different angles. We even, because the hearing stretched for two days, excuse me, the markup, I'm messing up my nomenclature there, the markup stretched for two days. So between the first and the second day of the markup, we actually ran because we were also streaming the markup on KeepTheWebOpen.com. And we pulled the Google analytics and shared them with the committee. And so we explained that we had 160,000 people from around the world in over 50 different countries from around the world in every state in the US who viewed this hearing for at least 20 minutes, excuse me, this markup for at least 20 minutes on this theoretically obscure, complicated internet policy. And so you had 80,000 hours of video time there because they care, because they knew it was that important. So the long and the short of it is that we were able to run the clock out, as one would say, between the first and the second session of Congress. At that point in time, we still, as the committee, excuse me, with Darrell Issa and some others made the decision that, you know what, there's more than needed to be heard here. And because Issa was chair of the oversight committee at the time, we announced that we were going to have a separate congressional hearing through the national security subcommittee of the oversight committee on the DNS second cyber security ramifications of bills like SOVA PIPA. And so we lined up guests, including Alexa Sonhanian, Stuart Baker, Dan Kaminsky, and others to talk about all of these different elements and potential harms that could happen. And we actually picked January 18, 2012, as the day. And based off of that, and some other situations, that's when Reddit, Wikipedia and others actually announced originally that they were going to black out their sites and show the hearing that day. Ultimately, by the time we reached that point, and especially based off of what happened at CES based off of the members and the advocacy there, we sort of were told by house leadership and also by the Obama administration White House at that point that there's no way in heck that SOVA PIPA would become law in their current form, at least as they saw it. And so while we chose not to have the hearing on January 12, because we had a lot of internal pressures not to, obviously the internet at large still chose to make its voice heard that day by having the largest internet blackout in history. And I'll stop right there because I know I've been talking a lot. That's an extraordinary story and we'll get to the internet blackout in a bit. Let me turn to Mara for a second. So Mara, this is like the dawn of digital advocacy. How did you approach the issue? How did you approach the messaging when you were trying to raise the alarm about these bills? Who are the audiences? You know, it's amazing listening to Ernie and Laurent speak. Like we were the gang of shoot straight in the beginning of this and sort of the legislative brilliance that was going on behind the scenes. It was the most difficult campaign and the one where we had the most fun. I think because things were so desperate, we were sort of able to be a little crazy and try stuff because we had to, you know, it was like this bomb had gone off in DC and nobody else knew. And how are we going to get the word out? And how are we going to explain like who's going to want to hear about something called SOPA PIPA? I mean, it was ridiculous. So we had to distill it into its most simplest form. And we eventually came up with like this is going to break the internet. And we had people like Stork Baker and Dan Kaminsky and Alex Ohanian there to say how. But we had to capture the hearts and minds. And as Ernie said, the internet was a different place 10 years ago. You know, in internet policy, we were all sort of still enjoying the unicorns and rainbows of the internet. When I listened to Laurent talk about our opposition, I'm still blown away 10 years later that this happened. But it did. Another hero of this effort is Mark M. Erickson, who was running Net Coalition at the time. And that and we worked with Net Coalition. And that sort of, if I remember, right, became the convening point where we got together working with, you know, the gurus like Laurent and it was Laurent. You're all I remember on the hill to try to turn this into, I mean, it was as we turned it into essentially a political campaign. But this time the candidate was the internet. And, you know, what could we do? We did ads, we did talk radio, we did more ads, we did letters, we did events. I had totally forgotten until we were talking yesterday about the whole CES thing, because we had this hearing. And then Michael, I remember talking to you, you know, over the Christmas holiday, you know, that we had to strike hard CES. I mean, it was such a crazy rush. I mean, and it was crazy. I remember being in the baggage claim of National Airport writing ads on my phone. We were getting hit from all sides. But because it was so desperate, we tried a lot of stuff. And it was amazing. Like Laurent said, you know, 160,000 people watching a markup. And that's when we started to get an idea that maybe we really were breaking through. And then it was just keeping our foot on the gas and coordinating this rag tag bunch of people who loved the internet from the right, from the left, from the public to stand up and protect it. And it really became as simple as that. It was almost like we formed the third party, you know, over those six months or whatever. And it was the internet party. Yeah, I mean, one thing that I do recall in all those meetings is the most incredibly diverse coalition. Like I've ever seen in any issue in DC, you had CCIA sitting next to Red State sitting next to the ACLU sitting next to the KTO, sitting next to Fight for the Future. How did that, and I'll throw those up in everybody, how was that coalition assembled? How did that come about? I will, Laurent and Ernie may know better what I just want to say to wrap up my earlier comments is what happened over those six months was real. I mean, we are all still together. I think the fact that we're so delighted to come and talk about it, and we still talk about it, is it really sort of was a little internet third party thing. And people who believed in it and still believe in it and try to keep it above politics. Now it's different now. But I think that our coalition remains. And I'll shut up. I'll just add to what Maura said there. She's absolutely right. And the unifying like value amongst all of these different kind of political groups is internet freedom. I mean, what it really boils down to is the internet needs to be this open medium, but you can do whatever you want with it and be free to do that. And SOPA united so many of these different groups because it was the exact opposite, right? It stood for a closed and censored internet that the government would be involved in closing it up. I want to add to, Laurent said it's such a phenomenal job of setting the stage on the house fight. And I want to add to it because first, people that benefit from the internet really do have to thank Laurent and Congressman Issa because in a world of 5,000 plus staffers, they literally were like the two people who were standing against the tide. And that takes an extraordinary amount of courage and willingness and stubbornness because the pressure was overwhelming. I mean, to give the stage before it got to the house because this is where public knowledge was very involved. It starts with December, about 11 months prior, or maybe 13 months prior actually because it was like November, if you remember, right? And it's a meeting with Patrick Leahy's staff with Gigi Stone, my self-insurgency about, oh yeah, we want to do something about counterfeits and a little bit something on intellectual property. And we're thinking of a bill which eventually became PIPA, so it didn't exist. And in the preceding or the following 10, 11 months of the Senate debate, we lost the debate the entire time. You had a filibuster proof co-sponsor list of 60 plus senators on PIPA before the house introduced the bill. You had, you know, and I remember marking with, you know, this is the untold story, so I'm just talking about things in the background. I remember talking to Brooke Ray Hunter who was at PK back then with me. And I said, if we don't have like a massive uprising, we stand no prayer of stopping this right now. And that was before the SOPA fight. And really, the time that Congressman Issa, Congresswoman Lofgren, Congressman Chaffetz, and Congressman Polis gave us to point to SOPA, which was essentially the product of arrogance in the sense of the industry was pushing PIPA. And Leahy kind of was the small, the smallifying effect. He said like, you know what, they have a lot of things they want. We're not going to do that, because that's just too much. We're going to do what we're trying to do, which is like some changes the edge. It was still a really bad bill, but SOPA was 10 times worse. And the reason got 10 times worse, because they were winning that Senate debate so handedly, that the House leadership and the way they kind of, you know, I think didn't give people like Lorana a fair shot at being involved in discussion. We're like, this is going to pass. Look how many senators are on this. We don't have to care what the opposition thinks. And they basically gave the entire wishlist of what the legacy companies wanted for changing the internet in SOPA, which if it wasn't for the 48 hours plus of, you know, essentially streaming that hearing, pointing that out, getting the articles drafted, the blog posts, the mobilization, all the social media platforms about like, what the heck is Congress doing? It was really that 48 hours that turned a sleepy issue into some of, we had several hundreds of thousands of people ready to be activated, which then, which then was leveraged to things like Chuck Schumer getting the largest protest he's ever had in the Senate career in New York, right? And, you know, 100,000 plus people signing a White House petition opposing SOPA, you know, which back then the White House had to respond to anything that had more than 100,000 signatures on it. So it easily got 100,000 plus. And so they had to issue an opinion, which meant they had to now analyze the bill, which is where the cybersecurity stuff started really come into effect. Dan Kamitsky, Steve Crocker and those folks, they were just these unassailable experts who wrote a white paper way in advance on the Senate debate, trying to explain what you're doing will break cybersecurity on the internet. It will make people less secure and it will fail. And there was, and I forget the full is Dave Dagon and I remember there's one or two others on that list, but these are unassailable experts on cybersecurity that the industry that we're supporting the bill like hated because they couldn't find any sort of official counterweight to that argument. And so when the White House finally got involved, one of the pieces that helped me finally take this out was, you know, the cybersecurity people, the serious people were looking at it and are like, yeah, this seems like a really terrible idea. And they interviewed all these experts are like, yeah, they all say it's a terrible idea, you know, including people like, you know, Baker. And it was, it was a phenomenal time of losing night, the first, you know, first 90% of the fight and then suddenly winning a whirlwind win at the very tail end. And in Laurent and Congress, I really do want to give a lot of credit to because there was a House majority and being House leadership on the Republican side, you know, to counterweight a Democratic Senate majority was was essential. Crazy to think had Laurent and Congressman Issa not been there. What would we be talking about right now? What would the internet even look like right now? Crazy. Yeah, I mean, one thing that's fascinated me about this whole era and this discussion is how many how many like firsts were really achieved, right? Laurent was talking about Congressman Issa putting the bill up on the internet and keep the web open and encouraging comments and suggestions to improve the draft language that had never been done before. Congressman Paulus at that point was was lobbying against the bill and advocating against the bill on legal legends. That was a first. And another first that I remember is this is the first time I can remember small companies and startups really getting engaged in DC advocacy, right? I think large companies have done it before. Certainly the Microsoft antitrust suit was a was a wake up call for large companies. You got to start paying attention. Smaller companies hadn't previously and and you know, this is the this really marked a turning point for groups like like engine and enabled and allowed startups to recognize their interest in DC and engage. I remember being at the beginning of the the soba pippa debate, being on an unrelated panel with Alexis Ohanian, you're talking about broadband or something. And he just asked what's going on in DC telling him we got this bill that we're fighting and it's really, really bad. And here's what it would do to the internet. And he got to stop and said, wow, okay, well, if I got some startups together and came to DC and talk directly to members of Congress, would that help? And I said, yeah, yeah, would let's let's do that. So, you know, he did it. And I remember being in our first meeting was with Senator Moran. And at that point is legislative assistant Mark Colwell. Mark Colwell. Yes, who played like a huge part in this. And we were sitting around the table and I think maybe Paul Geller and Derek Slater and Mike McGeary and Christian Dawson and Alexis and me. And Senator Moran came in and sat down and said, well, I was undecided about this bill, but I've done the research, I've listened to your arguments, and I decided you're absolutely right. I will oppose this bill. And then we walked out. It never happened. And Alexis turned to me and said, so do the meetings always go like this? No, no, they don't. But what impacted that did that small business and startup engagement have in making the case against this bill? Go ahead, Laurel. I just say, you know, it was very important part of the narrative that I was glad that we were that came into play when it did. And really, it was crucial as we were building upon the argument that, you know, that one, people love the internet. Two, the internet is creating tremendous amounts of innovation opportunity and economic growth. And any of these changes that were being proposed in SOPA had the potential to honestly just destroy that innovation and economic growth in its infancy. And having the young up-and-coming startups and their, you know, young leaders come to DC at that point in time was really, it was a crucial part of telling that story of showing lawmakers and their staffs, just explaining to them like what it meant, you know, 10 years ago, other than, yeah, maybe my office and three or four other offices, the ones we've already talked about on here, really had a strong understanding of what Reddit was or, you know, what other small startups like your Pinterest and others, even your bigger online platforms at that point, there was still not a high degree of familiarity of how they operated within Congress, other than honestly, a lot of times what the copyright and content industry were telling them, you know, they were just hearing all of the negatives over and over and over again. And so having those positive stories come into the mix was really important. And, you know, if we could have had 10 times the number of small startups in Alexis's back come back at that point, we might have been able to have like, honestly, pause the bill from moving forward without having to have done sort of as innovative or outside of the box tactics as we ultimately had to do. Their stories were great. It was just, you know, we were still running up against the clock there, but it was very important to get that, that those stories out. I would say from a media perspective, the same people that Laurent is talking about, I mean, we had a parade of companies of new companies like this, the internet's giant economic and innovative engine coming out of the woodwork. And that I think helped beat back or helped, well, I wouldn't say shame, but pull the curtain back on the, on what the real intent of the bills were. And that it was protecting legacy business models, because here you have all these startups with nothing but a broadband connection, creating huge economic growth and innovation. And for the media, it was, I mean, what reporter would not take a story that's like Alex Ohanian and Reddit, and Fox News, or, you know, Christian Dawson and Servit, I think was his company, you know, compared to just this giant slow big business, I mean, you couldn't write it better. And, you know, that that really helped us, you know, the threat happened to be real. And those who were threatened happened to be real. And media, it really caught interest in the media. It was great. It was David and Goliath's story. You're on mute, Michael. There we go. The internet blackout was a was a huge turning point. I forget who came up with the original idea. I think it may have been fight for the future. Or it may have been I thought Jimmy Wales came up with it himself. No, I actually do think it was. I think it was fight because because the Wiki process was like super cumbersome. And they kind of was driven by their thousands of contributors that like rose up to the chain. And then, you know, then he then they got on board. But Tiffany Chang and and Holmes or the two I remember kind of coming up with the idea of the American censorship day. And then kind of which which leveraging off the the markup and the substitute hearing that Congressman Issa was thinking the chairman. And and then when that passed, then it was like, what's the next step? And then we just that's when the numbers were hitting and we're like, what can we do with with millions of people right now on you come January, which was the what was it like a markup date was the target? I'm trying to remember exactly why we chose it. Right. January. Yeah. And it was originally going to be that was the day that we were going to do the alternative hearing. And basically on January 18th was when it was a period of time of when protect the protect IP Act was potentially going to be moved in the Senate again. So there were there was like a legislative window of time that we were specifically targeting with that date. Right. And to go back to the internet, the internet blackout, I mean, it had a it had a unprecedented reaction and impact. Apparently, on the day after the blackout, more than 8 million people looked up their member of Congress and Wikipedia, 3 million emailed Congress to express opposition to the bills. More than a million messages were sent to Congress through EFF alone, and more than 14 million names, more than 10 million of them voters contacted Congress to protest the bills. Laurent at being on the hill at that point, what was that like? For, well, for me and for the Congress and ICE's office at that time, it was it was a great day. It was honestly, it was a day of validation, because we've been saying to members to offices to industry for months, that this not only is it a bad idea, but it's one that generally the public opposes that is, you know, counter to like where the country is headed and where we are going and like to the spirit of innovation and economic growth and everything else. And so to basically have been shunned and kind of, you know, on technology issues or on internet issues, kind of we were treated as pariahs for a bit while all of this was going on internally. And so when the blackout day happened, and you sort of, you know, see action, the action come behind the words that you've been saying, it was very validating in that sense. But then what was interesting was the day after, because the next day, I was in a meeting with about 70 members of Congress. So I was a staffer in this meeting. It was a leadership meeting and whatnot. And so, you know, my old boss, Congressman Isis, they're debating against Bob Goodlatte and they're explaining each side of it was, you know, we were in opposition to SOPA. He was explaining they were still trying to salvage the legislation to members of why it was actually good and the public was mistaken and all that. And Tom Cole from Oklahoma just had a great question that he brought up because he raises his hand and he says, so you're telling me that this bill is not bad. It's not wrong that it's going to do all of these positive things, right? But their side's wrong. And Goodlatte's like, well, yes, that's right. That's correct. That's what the chairman's saying. And so Tom Cole says, well, why don't I have 2,000 people calling my office in support of this piece of legislation, like I've got calling an opposition to it right now. He's like, you bring that out for me and then maybe I'll consider showing it. So, to tie this all together, most members of Congress outside of the judiciary and kind of and commerce committees still really didn't understand what these pieces of legislation were. They gave deference to those committees. They were told by the content and, you know, in the copyright, copyright maximalist sides and others that they should support these, that they should support SOPA and PIPA. And they said, okay, you've been behind me before, I'm going to get on board here and kind of left it at that without giving it a second thought. And it truly, as Ernie referenced earlier, it took a massive uprising, you know, lawmakers measure constituent phone calls by the pound. That's how you kind of have to look at it. So if you have one or two people calling and saying that they don't like it, that's one thing. You have 2,000 or more, that says something. And honestly, to me, the day after the blackout and the days that came, in essence, once we sort of saw like the sheer amount of constituencies that contacted that let their voices be known on how they cared about the Internet, I used to like to say that over 80% of the general public loves the Internet the way that it was or is for them, whereas at that point in time about 13% liked Congress. So should we really have one of the most unpopular entities in the country trying to mess with one of the most popular entities when they don't understand it. And so based off of all of that, in essence, and that huge backlash in response to, you know, the day of advocacy, the blackout day, members didn't want to have their bill, their piece of legislation become the next SOPA. They didn't want to get SOPA. It became a verb. But the object lesson to what Laurent is saying is that, you know, in a perfect world, SOPA and PIPA never would have happened, because nobody in Congress really, except for those four people, understood anything about the Internet. And if the Internet was not up there educating, somebody else filled that vacuum. And that remains true. And it's also the cautionary tale of this. Internet is incredibly complicated. You got to spend the time to teach. Yeah. I just remember after the bill had been pulled, I walked into a coffee shop and I had my laptop on the counter and there was a sticker that stopped SOPA PIPA. And there was a woman behind the counter and she pointed to it. She said, nice sticker. And I said, yeah, it worked out okay, didn't it? And she said, yeah, I called my member of Congress. Oh, wow. This time I felt like my voice really mattered. So it was this, it really was the key moment in like digital activism. But I want to continue going where Mara was going, which is, what's the relevance of this today, right? So as we sit here today, we were once again engaged in the debate over Internet speech. This time in the Section 230 context, we're engaged in a debate over the relative power of tech innovators, you know, versus traditional incumbents such as newspapers. We talk about how to ensure technology is a positive social force and benefiting users. Are we in Groundhog Day? Is this the same issue or is it different? And if so, how? I'll open that up to anybody. Yeah, you know, I'll just sort of start off and obviously others should add on here. Um, if we think back, SOPA PIPA was originally premised around copyright reform. It was premised around, you know, the Internet has become a wild place for copyright infringement and without new laws that would punish platforms and place additional sort of requirements upon ISPs and on the public at large, that you couldn't handle or manage or have, you know, models that could work basically in that structure without still allowing for high degrees of infringement. And since then, we've seen a number of models emerge that have, you know, especially through streaming, whether it's music or movies, that have kind of blown that theory right out of the water. And especially on the infringement side. Yes, there's still infringement online, but, you know, it's just not at the scale and the level. And it's very different from what we were talking about 10 years ago. So that element has changed. However, we still see, you know, there are the dynamics have changed to a certain extent, because now a lot of these Internet platforms are not emerging companies. They are major companies. They are in some instances, some of the largest companies in the world. And so in that sense, the, you know, the model of economic innovation there has worked successfully. However, there are still instances of where we see different parties who are trying to sort of leverage either the same arguments from 10 years ago or modifications of them to still place additional restrictions that wouldn't just impact the large platforms, the Googles, the Facebooks, the Amazons of the world, but that would still have the same types of downstream consequences on future companies, companies like the one that I work out right now, Patreon and others in regards to their potential future growth models. And so we have to keep on looking out for that. And, you know, right now they're the arguments on section 230, which is a broader issue that also just tremendously impacts Internet platforms, as well as some of the issues around even, you know, link taxing. But I know Ernesto, you could probably go more into that and some other things as well. So I'll stop right there. Yeah, I mean, I think the market has changed a lot. And a lot of the the reality is we were proven right about if you made it more legal and more accessible at the right price points, people will pay. And if you look at the streaming world of today, you look at all kind of the, you know, how profitable it all is now. You know, that just wasn't believed back then, 10 years ago. No one believed you could do that. And so they just thought you had to block access rather than promote access to content as a means of making money from the Internet. The, and I would say kind of the membership of Patreon is just as a phenomenal industry of its own. It's that's essentially the independent Internet creator industry. They're bigger than they've ever been, but they're still small. And I would say they are, in my opinion, they are kind of what tech was 10 years ago in that they're very important to the, you know, cultural and information exchange of this country because they add to the conversation in all sorts of ways. They create content and that's independent and new and different and challenging to, you know, perceptions that's very important for a democracy. And the proposals and leveraging kind of the tech last, if you will, you know, a lot of the players are the same players who wanted to change the Internet in the first place 10 years ago. You know, I think one of the most interesting ones is, you know, News Corp and Rupert Murdoch and how, you know, he was in the doorshow of SOPA. And now, you know, you see what happens in Australia and the debate around link tax and how that's kind of coming back here. It's the same company. It's the same, it's the same mindset they had from the beginning in that we don't like how distribution works and how open it is. We want to have more control over how this works. And we want to be the ones that receive the benefits of that. And what does that mean for like the independent blogger, the independent journalists, local journalism and ways we can promote local journalism instead of legacy entities, you know, is really where the questions should be, which are, you know, I think is the similarity between then and now with the, you know, with the big difference being, you know, sometimes the big tech companies are now the focal point of questions of content being removed, right? I think if you, you know, last thought is, but the public's perception about how open the internet should be and the internet freedom, I think that population is still there. And I think they're still vibrant. And I think if you look at the frustrations they have, you know, ironically now with the tech sector in terms of content, in terms of how it's taken down and in a lot of the debate that's happening, that's driven by people, right? That's driven by a lot of different people with a lot of different expectations of how the internet should operate. And I think it's the same kind of crowd that prefers, you know, more things have flowed over the internet than less. And that's kind of the, that's still a heart of the debate that we're having now, particularly with Section 230 and in the related, the proposals that are happening. Great. Let me go to one of our questions from Paul Geller, who it's always great to see. What an incredible crew of familiar faces. I'm wondering if any of the panelists' views have evolved since Super Peppa? Any thoughts? I think my, I'll start. Yeah, I felt like we will never lose this fight, but we've definitely lost some of these fights in Europe when it comes to like Article 13 and the debate over copyright filtering. And so there's, even though we had this massive movement and moment, and we had a pretty massive move in Europe, the outcome was different there. And now the, the fight will be about the dynamics. So I think my view, that my view has changed that we're, we are, we will not win every single fight, even with this massive crowd. And we will have to remedy the mistakes over time, because we'll be, we'll be proven right, you know, it just, it's just more work to be done and more mobilization, more organization, and we're, we're here for that. But a SOPA will, it will never happen again. I don't think it was a perfect storm of where the internet was in its development, the craziness of the actual bills, the misunderstanding or no understanding on the part of Congress, except for Laurent and Congressman Issa, a public that was enamored with all of the amazing things that the internet was delivering. I just, you know, I think it was a perfect storm. And we took, you know, we did well with what we had, but I think that the days of the internet, you know, marching in in the 11th hour with unicorns and rainbows is over. You know, you say 10 years is dog years for Congress, it's, I don't know, name your animal years for the internet, right? If you think of, you know, Moore's Law, you know, the internet is a completely different thing than it was 10 years ago. So, you know, there are different realities now. Yeah, you know, I'd say that some areas, my views are still very similar to where they were a decade ago, I'd say especially in regards to sort of the dynamics around online copyright. But, you know, 10 years ago, most of the companies that were a part of the net coalition that were really, you know, working with this, not the NGOs and social society groups and others, but the companies were pretty small. They were kind of nascent. And now they're some of the world's largest. And so I'd say that my, my perspectives have evolved some on antitrust over the last decade to kind of like look at that. And I think that, you know, and some of the, some people are worried like about whether or not these platforms have too much power necessarily versus, you know, where they were a decade ago before. And I think that, you know, those are legitimate questions to ask and be analyzed. But I think that in regards to what SOPA and PIPA were and the problems that they were trying to address and how that they were, they were trying to address them, it was a bad bill then it would still be a bad bill today. So in that regard, nothing has changed. But I think that, you know, we just have, having history as perspective and understanding and seeing how the industry has grown and evolved, we can understand that, you know, you can't have a one size fits all, don't touch the internet at all in any way, shape, or form sort of policy. But it's about understanding where the things that we need to tweak and adjust that still will allow for dynamism, growth, new opportunity, and, you know, and ultimately freedom of speech that we all come to love and value. So about 280 members of Congress, about two thirds, were not in office 10 years ago to consider the bills that we're talking about. What, so for these new members, what lessons does SOPA and PIPA have for them? And what lessons does this experience have for for people tech and innovation advocates who are trying to educate members of Congress? Like what do we learn? You know, I think that there are a few different lessons, like both sort of the members who are currently, yeah, who are in there, those who have been in there. One is that at least 10 years ago, the spirit of bipartisanship was still alive. And that especially on these technology issues that they do still present opportunities to cross party lines and to find strange bedfellows, so to speak, that you can work with in order to find pathways forward. I think, secondarily, you know, it comes back to this question of like, will Congress continue to bring in experts or to hire experts internally, members who understand policy, will, you know, more technology policy, will more of those types of people choose to run for office as well. And then if they do get into office, be allowed to be on the appropriate committees of jurisdiction, so that they can actually put their expertise to use within Congress directly. I think that, you know, that's really important because the information gap on these issues was so huge. And it was one of the most glaring things that really we took away from it. I think also, you know, it's just really about understanding that you can take a stand. I mean, honestly, we were in office that took a stand against leadership, but because we and members on both sides of the aisle, you know, saw that this was a bigger issue than what members understood to be at that point in time chose to take a stand. And I think that, you know, that's something that doesn't happen enough in Congress that hopefully more members will choose to do on issues where they are aligned and fuel are truly right. I would say that what will hopefully help prevent things like this coming again is the kind of the new blood of Congress means like these people grew up more of the internet been less, right, and and grew up more of technology, even less, particularly staff. And I'll give like, you know, some of the, you know, the untold stories. And one of the one of my favorite parts of this fight was meeting with Congressman Lund Grinn's Homeland Security staff about he was the he was the secretary chair of cybersecurity at the time and, you know, his staff, you know, I walked I walked him through DNS sec and the white paper from technical experts explain the problems of SOPA in terms of the cybersecurity issues. And they heard me and then there's a you know, it's a fairly older gentleman was chief counsel. I'm forgetting his name on my head, but you know, he heard me out. And then what convinced him was he asked his son like, Hey, like, would it be really easy for you to just switch the DNS, you know, pour on your router to just get around if Congress started blocking it? He's like, Yeah, dad, it would be really easy. And he got back to me. He's like, Yeah, you know what, like, I didn't know what to think, but my kid says he could do it pretty easily. And if he can do it, then shoot anyone can do it. And this seems like a big problem. And so by now, you know, 10 years later, I hopefully that kids a staffer, right? And so, you know, it'll it'll help having more, you know, young people were in off, you know, in in the staffing positions with the knowledge of just how the technology works to get away from these like really, the internet is magic, and we can have magic solutions with to solve these problems thinking, which is which is really kind of the source of why SOPA got as far as it did. Okay, go into more for the final word. Oh, final word. Well, I know what our final word was after we got through all of this, we had a big happy hour and we called it SOPA pipa drinka. I don't know. Come back to me. I'll think about it. I remember when the bill was the bill was finally pulled, which was like in late January, January 24. I was at Starbucks. So a bunch of us, you know, the twin logic team and a bunch of people were working on the bill, went out to to lunch to celebrate. And we ended this like nice restaurant in Capitol Hill. And we all sat down. And then we noticed in the other corner of the restaurant, we're industry lobbyists who were like drowning their sorrows. We're like, oops, this is a bit awkward. So but we had a lunch and we ate food. We maybe enjoyed some libations and were there for a long time. And then we went to pay the bill. And the waiter said, no, no, no, that bill was paid for by the other table, which just goes to show that that's, that's it, Michael DC. And that's class. And, you know, you can disagree on things and then move on. But not everything is broken. That's, that's right, Michael. Exactly. Okay. So thank you, everybody. What an amazing discussion. I want to remind you that we are not only celebrating the 10th anniversary of SOPA pipa, but also the 20th anniversary of the extraordinary work of public knowledge. And with that, I want to turn it over to public knowledge as President Chris Loops. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, panelists. And thank you to Senator Wyden's office for that great video. This is a great history lesson for those who didn't experience it and memory lane for others. I want to remind folks, this is part of a series that we're doing on the history of public knowledge with our 20th anniversary. So the next program that we have in a few weeks will be on public knowledge and the fight over digital works. So think of fair use and copyright law. Think of digital goods and ownership. Think of libraries and how they come into the digital age. We're going to talk about that at our next one. And I also want to encourage folks to subscribe to our YouTube channel because this and others, our episodes are available on our YouTube channel. And you can also support public knowledge on our 20th anniversary. We've set up a new recurring donation option on our page. I hope some of you will sign up to become friends of public knowledge where you can give a small amount every month. And if you give us up to $20 or more, then you'll be counted in as a friend of PK and certainly we'll have a nice gift for you. We appreciate your support. But this has been a great conversation and it really hopefully sets the stage for folks, how folks think about how these issues connect to what we're fighting right now. I heard a lot of great connections to our fight for antitrust and dealing with power of big platforms. But this core issue of the open internet is central to PK's work. So thank you all for coming. And thank you panelists. Thank you, Michael, for