 purposefully, why don't I start again, 10 years ago in 2012 Wikipedia together with many other websites was purposefully made unavailable for one day. When trying to access Wikipedia that one day, you just saw a black screen with a disclaimer saying that Wikipedia was unavailable in order to raise awareness about two proposed US laws called SOPA and PIPA. If you don't know about SOPA and PIPA, then no worries, you will learn about it during this panel whose purpose is to look back at the events 10 years ago and to draw lessons from it for the future. And in fact, you have the best possible host for guiding us all through the panel. And I'm not talking about myself, of course, I'm talking about Eric Möller. Eric is a freelance journalist, a software developer and an author. He has a long history with Wikimedia. He started to be involved in 2001. Little reminder, 2001 is the year that Wikipedia was founded. So he is an early adopter, a very early adopter. And so back in 2001, Eric got involved as both an editor and as a developer of Media Wiki, the software that Wikipedia runs on. He also gave Wiki News its initial momentum. Later on, he became deputy director of the Wikimedia foundation where he stayed until 2015 and now he's freelance. Most important in the context of this panel is that Eric was one of the persons at Wikimedia, one of the key persons at Wikimedia during the blackout 10 years ago, which is why I said he's the best possible person to moderate the panel. And with that, Eric, over to you. Hey, can folks hear me okay? Yes. Great. Thank you for the intro. Just to clarify, nowadays I'm running engineering at Freedom of the Press Foundation, which is the nonprofit that, among other things, manages the security of open source versus lower platform and of course also advocates for policies that protect the free and open internet. But yeah, thank you for the introduction and also the summary of what we're going to talk about. We don't just want to talk about what happened 10 years ago, but also what it means for the moment we're in is something like the success of the super blackout repeatable in the current moment, in the current technological and political environment or is it not, in what legislative threats are emerging today. With me to have this discussion, we have Corey Doctorow, who is the author of a vast bibliography of fiction and non-fiction alike. As an author, Corey has consistently advocated against copyright maximalism, even while folks have pretended to speak on his behalf in favor of copyright maximalism. He is the author of non-fiction works that are very much relevant to this discussion, such as How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism and coming up later this year, Choppoint Capitalism, How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets in Help We Wind Them Back. He's also a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Welcome, Corey. And we have Tiffany Chang, who is the co-founder of Fight for the Future without Fight for the Future. There would probably not have been a super blackout. Fight for the Future was absolutely instrumental in helping organize this grassroots campaign. She wrote, and Tiffany wrote an excellent analysis earlier this year, which I encourage you to check out. Someone could put a link to the chat. I would appreciate it. It's called How the Super Blackout Happened on TechDroid. So take a look at that if you want to read a little bit more in detail than what we're going to be able to talk about today. Tiffany was a Shovel Worth and a Shoko Fellow at Fight for the Future. She's helping run the Ateams Initiative, which I'm sure we'll talk about here later today, as well as some of the ongoing campaigns at FTF. Welcome, Tiffany. We also have Mishi Chaudhry. Mishi is a technology lawyer, legal director at the Software Freedom Law Center defending software freedom and online rights in the United States and in India. Welcome, Mishi. It's so great to have you. Let's jump right in. We can assume that some folks in the audience were still fairly young when the super blackout happened. So I think it will be useful to just start with what was this legislation? Why was it such a big deal? Why was it so important to mobilize the free and open internet against it? I'm just going to actually kick it over here to Tiffany. Tiffany, do you want to talk a little bit about how this came onto the radar for Fight for the Future and why it was such a big deal? Sure. So there is this bill called SOPA, which had, by the time we looked at it, had gathered around 90 co-sponsors. And it was the biggest piece of legislation that Hollywood, MPAA, RIA had spent. They had spent the most money that they've ever spent on one piece of legislation. And it was slated to passage. And this bill, SOPA, or it's also known as PIPPA, would have made it possible for alleged or potential copyright holders to be able to say that there was infringing content on a website and be able to, outside of the courts, without having to prove it, shut down an entire website by going to ISPs. And there would be a process for that, but it would basically be an on and off switch and one that would shut down entire websites' speech, basically, over a single piece of content in an alleged way. So when it was obviously an overreach of legislation, when you think about whether or not you should wake up to the internet and see your favorite website go down, for no reason, and without any sort of process around it. And that was in the fall of 2010. It was slated to passage, and it seemed like without a giant protest on the internet, this bill would have passed. And for the most part, all the tech companies, all the websites, excuse me, I'm a little sick, but we're going and policymakers were expecting this to pass. But the internet decided we do something. And it's significant because not only was this a maximist piece of legislation that would have damaged the internet and all of the good things that we like about the internet, it was going to just happen. But because the internet was able to organize and bring the threat to scale so quickly, this was the first piece of legislation that we've seen that actually killed such a expected to be passed legislation with no previously organized opposition in a matter of months. And so Congress was completely surprised. And so were we. I mean, it just didn't we didn't think that we could so quickly be able to organize like that. And that was that was really what I think captured the imagination of people on all sides of the debate, because it's pretty remarkable how powerful the internet can be when there's such a big threat. So I hope that's a good intro. There's lots of things that happened, obviously to make that happen. But it was significant and Congress still to this day, they don't want to get so good. And I think that is that it's still a watershed moment that that, you know, we have as a watermark for us to try to reach for the next time there is something that big again. Yeah, one line that you used in your respective really stayed with me in that that's the line that lobbies and legislators weren't allowed to think about anything else. Like the wave of pressure that came on to Congress, like it was really unprecedented, 10 million contacts to representatives, to senators. It was absolutely incredible. And that was because the backup wasn't just an internet blackout. It wasn't just we're taking down these websites. It was also like a mass mobilization campaign to contact your representative to contact legislators and tell them that this this is not okay. As I recall, and Cory, I'd be curious if this reflects your understanding of how this unfolded as well. As I recall, like basically folks assumed this was this was going to just pass. Everyone was kind of an autopilot. Everyone was on board with this legislation in Congress. And then whereas Tiffany said, folks were taken by surprise by this blackout. Yeah, I think that's true. I was in Washington, not long before the passage. And you know, I'm not a hill insider by any means. I'm much more of a outside the tent pissing and then inside the tent pissing out kind of guy. But I know a lot of those inside the tent pissing out types, people who are of goodwill but who've been brought into the establishment. And universally what they told me in the run up to the SOPA vote was that you know my brief when I left DC was to go home and think about what we would do in a post SOPA world that organizing resistance was a waste of time. The fix was in the votes were counted. And you know, as Aaron Swartz told it, we knew the tide was changing when lawmakers who had sponsored the bill stood up on the floor to denounce it, which is always a trip to have people telling you what a terrible idea those other people had when those other people includes themselves. And you know, as Tiffany said, they couldn't think about anything else. Eight million phone calls were put through Congress's switchboard in 72 hours. And that made a significant impression. Misha, I'm curious in your own legal practice, what echoes did this this unprecedented blackout have for activism for your work in India as well as in the United States when it comes to understanding the impact of legislation when it comes to mobilizing resistance against ban legislation. Thank you. I'm just ordered that these people to be here with all of you who have done wonderful public things. But I must ask you to think of me as a person who lawyers for people like them. And sometimes I'm a scout who comes for a sporadic moment to keep them out of trouble. And at other times I come along behind them, trying to exploit the extraordinary opportunities that activism has created. But no matter what I do, whether I'm out ahead or coming up behind, everything I'm going to say today is going to seem less immediate and direct. Because the activist job is to be immediate and direct and make all these things happen as Corey and Tiffany have been talking about. And lawyer's job is just a lawyer's job. So whether it's as the clients had represented in the past, such as the Free Software Foundation movement, which has had the DRM website, it has been running a variety of things. The interesting bit is sometimes you get involved into by just, can you check, we are going to run this campaign and can you check the language kind of a thing. And then you get sucked into the details of it behind the scenes. So what interestingly to me, it's the impact, the entire movement here had what the reverberations which the rest of the world heard in our own organization in India. I think the pivot became much clearer that how so many different stakeholders could join hands and then could actually change certain things. The fact that internet.org, which was Free Basics by Facebook, was kicked out of India in 2015, had a lot of inspiration from what people were able to achieve at that point in time. And because there is no tech conversation, which will nowadays happen without Twitter or Elon Musk being mentioned in the past two weeks, I will say that one interesting thing which stood out to me much later on was that that time people talked about 2.4 million tweets were talked about this and even Mark Zuckerberg used Twitter to ask people to talk about this, but the most important bit there was, I will say that the civil society was able to come together in different forms and make a point by turning the internet off, which in today's world is not going to be possible. But what it spawned and what it inspired all around the world in terms of various other movements and how people started to view things, that was the major point that you could actually make a difference and make a change even when the details are not clear. And a lot of times the people who are bringing this take it for granted that there's not going to be much which can come in its way or have not even read which often happens have not even read for what read what they're recommending. But to me, that's the most important bit about that civil society turned off a basic lifeline to make a point. And everyone else was watching because now the world has moved to a different regime in terms of where the markets are and the importance of what happened that is going to also determine what we were doing in the future. Yeah, and just to get in there, I think we haven't explained what actually happened during the Sova Blackout. And I think the free basics example you cite is actually brings us back to it, which is it was the first time that civil society groups individuals internet users in the millions along with tech companies and websites actually work together and we're able to organize each other. And that's that's the part that the internet helps to bring to scale or make accelerate to this, you know, two month mark that actually made it so that the internet shut down for a day and it was the internet blackout world's largest or the history's largest on protest because all of these groups figured out how to work together because of a threat that was so large. And I think the internet stood up to that challenge and obviously in that case one, and then free basics, which happened a few years later, we actually talked to them and they amazingly, and it's often really hard to harness the same kind of energy a few years later, but we're able to harness a really, really similar energy using really similar tactics that we talked about and worked on with them. And it was incredible to see another moment where this could happen in such a big country. So I think there's things we can talk about why that worked and why that can't work again, but I think the fact that it happened, it's really hopeful. Yeah, to your point Tiffany, I wanted to share a few examples of blackout websites as well for those who didn't see it happen in real time. Is the screen share coming through okay? Yeah. So this is of course the Wikipedia blackout page. This is the version which had the contact your representatives form on it, which we really put together at the last minute with the zip code database to look at your representatives fixing bugs until last minute to make sure that you're connected to the right congressperson. This was us at Wikipedia Foundation working in this so-called wall room that we had set up just to plan the blackout very carefully. And it was a real blackout, I think that's important to note, like yes, you could work around it, but it was kind of troublesome to work around it. You had to switch to the malware side, turn up JavaScript, prevent it from loading. It was definitely not like just like, oh, it's a banner, I'll click it away. It was really making it harder for you to get to Wikipedia, which was a pretty big deal, which is a contrast with what other websites were doing like Google and other big tech sites did more symbolic things like putting a black bar on the Google logo, which is of course very noticeable, but at the same time doesn't really prevent you from doing anything. And then you had like very big lining pages like the Mozilla Lining page just telling folks to take action against this legislation, wired, blacking out, WordPress blacking out, memes of course, what so far, I should go look it up on Wikipedia. Oh no. And at the same time, there's of course the sharp contrast with the big social media sites, Twitter, Facebook actually saying we're not going to be part of this directly. Yes, Mark tweeted about it, but there was no Facebook blackout. There was no Twitter blackout. Google was one of the big tech outcomes that did something, but again, it didn't go as far. And still one thing that I think in this current environment was noting like even then a lot of this grassroots energy against SOPA folks tried to connect that with what Big Tech was doing and say like, oh, this is just Big Tech like masquerading as and being a grassroots movement in reality, it's just Google controlling these people and telling them what to do. So that was the SOPA blackout itself. But then of course, doing the SOPA blackout, I should say this as well, hundreds of thousands, over 100,000 individual websites blackout. It wasn't just a big, big name. A lot of people participate in forms big and small. But before that, in earlier in November, there was already a precursor to the SOPA blackout called American censorship day. Tiffany, can you talk a little bit about how that worked? Yeah, I mean, American censorship day was the first protest against SOPA that really ceded what became the SOPA blackout on January 18th. And it came up, it was the idea of the protest. And that was what was significant because prior to American censorship day, the opposition to SOPA was on blogs and articles and in petitions. And those are really, really important for educating and building the base, obviously. But realizing that you could use your website, you can take a tool, build a tool so that any website could use their property and actually deny people access so that it was a real protest of if Congress is going to do this, we're going to show how much it could, what this actually means and do something that matters where we have skin in the game. And that showed how much people actually care. And I think, so American censorship day was the first time that this idea of what a protest could on the internet actually looks like, like a real has teeth protest looks like. That's what American censorship day did. And it also, I think, really said honestly what this bill was about. And it was, and we called it the first American censorship system. And if it were to pass, because it would be a way in which you could sort of on and off turn off websites. And at that time, the big website that participated that we, you know, I think we all did a lot of organizing to make happen. And to get the idea to take hold, started with Boing Boing Corey. And, and then we got to Tumblr through, through all different channels of tons of people helping to make that happen, making the policy case, making the legal case, making the activism case. And so because of that, there were millions of contacts, 80,000 calls, Congress was surprised then too. But that's when the internet went ablaze on this issue. And from there, and Eric knows well, there was a question. Okay, we didn't kill this bill with American censorship day, because that's just that was just building towards what we really need to do is really make sure everybody on the internet sees this for one day. And that's all they see. And that's the that was the essential powerful idea behind the blackout. It's that actually ended up happening. But in those months, it was organizing within the Wikimedia community, because and, and lots of other communities, I think Craigslist and Reddit are also did as much as Wikimedia Wikimedia. But it was those months of talking and thinking about what the stakes are, why one should do it, and really convincing each other. I think there was this amazing, if you saw it, and I don't know if it's ever it's archived at all, the bottom up discussion of why Wikipedia should do this, that actually led to the final decision. That was hard work. And that's the kind of thing that wants you that that leads to big things like this. And I absolutely Wikimedia actually shutting down was one of the biggest reasons why SOPA died. Without that, it would have, it would not be the same. And huge, huge credit goes to Jimmy Wells for bringing that conversation to the English Wikipedia community, stimulating lots of debate there. And just cross-length the Wikipedia SOPA initiative page on English Wikipedia is huge page. So it might slow down your browser considerably if you try to load it right now. Just because of the sheer amount of discussion that that took place in the community, but is very much leaning towards we must do something here like this is a big deal. What is super interesting on this page, if you check it out today is like the depth of that discussion, like it was definitely like a Wikipedia discussion in the sense of like, let's talk about like what this legislation really means, like the Wikimedia Foundation General Council at the time, Jeff Brigham provided like a detailed legal analysis, like these are the changes that Congress has made to date. They're still not enough. Here's why it's still a big deal. So it was really informed under which discussion and kind of that you rarely see in online activism. Tiffany, you pointed out something really important, which is this notional individual websites participating. I think when we think about online protests today, often we talk about like social media, hashtag campaigns, which is a very different thing. Like you're going through a corporate gatekeeper and saying, hey, we're going to use your platform to mobilize against X or Y cause. Here it was individual website owners who said, I'm going to take my website and list it in this cause. Cory, how did Boeing Boeing come to that decision to participate as like an example of a website joining a cause like this? You know, I think that you've just come to the heart of the matter and the answer to how did Boeing Boeing come to do it is very anodyne and it tells you, I think, what's changed because the way Boeing Boeing decided to do it is we decided, there's four of us, we ran the website and we said, this is wrong. We're going to do it. And I've been doing this. I've just had my 20th anniversary with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. So I've been doing this for a long time. And when I think about SOPA, which comes halfway through my activist career, it makes me think about what happened before and what happened after. And so one of my formative memories of internet activism after I joined EFF was the new royalty guidelines from the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel, the most bizarre and boring anodyne thing you can imagine, but it had enormous consequences. So CARP was a panel that was struck by the Copyright Office to figure out what it would cost to stream music on internet radio stations. And what they said when they sat down to do this is internet radio is already a thing. Mostly thanks to Carl Malamud, who I think a lot of us know and love. And so we're just going to set like a dummy rate. And then we're going to have this panel and we're going to meet with all the stakeholders and figure out the prices. And so during that period, that interregnum a couple, three years at the start of the 2000s, there was this incredible outpouring of internet radio where like David Byrne had a station he broadcast from like his spare room of just stuff that he loved and everyone was doing it, teenagers, everyone. And then CARP met and they came up with a royalty rate that was so high that all of those stations shut down overnight, like bam, gone. And I was talking with someone from the record industry's policy side about this. And what they said is, we don't like having a bunch of people just able to set up and do what they want. What we want is to have like five companies in the industry. And then we will meet with them individually and we will negotiate a bespoke deal that's good for all of us, right? Well, that's what we've got now, right? We've got Spotify and Pandora and YouTube Music, Amazon Music, a couple more. And the record industry, for the most part, are big investors in those streamers. And they have over and over again negotiated lower per stream royalties, the opposite of what they did back in the CARP days, lower per stream royalties, because when Spotify pays a lower royalty to the artists, they pay a higher dividend to their shareholders. And if you're Universal Music and you get a dividend, it goes to your shareholders. If you're Universal Music and you get a royalty, it goes to your workforce. It goes to the musicians. So this was a way of engineers would call it impedance matching, right? Five giant record companies, five giant internet companies, they all sit down. They don't always agree. They're going to fight a lot about how many points should be shifted from this side of the balance sheet to that side, what music owns or entertainment owns and what tech owns and back and forth. But they want the same kinds of negotiating policy, because then you don't get these unquantifiable risks, like tens of thousands of independently managed websites run by committees of four weirdos who say, oh, no, we're just going to black out our page because we don't like a piece of legislation. They can't even enumerate all the people who might do that, much less target them in any meaningful way. So right after CARP, there was a day when a piece of legislation very similar to SOPA was tabled in 50 state houses at once. And it was a very chaotic piece of legislation and different names in different states. And it ended up not going anywhere in part because most of this copyright stuff is federal. But at the time, I remember colleagues at EFF being spitting that because they were like, Microsoft is a giant monopolist and they can't even put a lobbyist in every state house. Like what is the point of having a tech sector that's being corrupted by a giant monopolist if they can at least shake a few pennies loose from the back of the SOFA cushions to have someone in all 50 state houses? Because we were like 12 people at the time. We were going to have people in 50 state houses watching this stuff. And we kind of got our wish. Right now, Microsoft and the other tech platforms, they have basically come together and formed a cohesive bargaining block. And where we used to get together and say, okay, we're going to block out tens of thousands of websites in order to change Congress's mind. Now we say we're going to black out our avatars to change an executive's mind at a tech company in the hopes that they might go and change Congress's mind. And you know, the thing we worried about in the days of SOFA was that you would have five record executives or six movie executives or five TV executives who just have the power of life and death over entire websites, you know, what you might call it an ad tech, a vertical, right? Like the place where everyone gets their information about cars, say, would suddenly be live or die based on the whims of an executive. And that's what we've got, right? That is what we've got. Because those independent websites effectively don't exist. And to the extent they exist, 100% of their revenue comes from an ad tech duopoly, Facebook and Google, who just unilaterally and opaquely make these choices. And so we now have our communications infrastructure being structured by unaccountable groups of individuals. And rather than being able to participate directly, all we do is sit on the sidelines and wonder whether Elon Musk is going to buy Twitter, right? Whether Elon Musk will become God Emperor of Twitter, the way Mark Zuckerberg appointed himself God Emperor for life of three billion people's social lives. And I know I've been talking for a long time, but I want to end by saying something that really made me change the way I thought about this stuff around 2003, 2004, which was I read a paper by Tim Wu, who was then a communications professor and a protege of Larry Lessig's called Copyrights Communications Policy. And Tim was a scholar of monopoly and telecoms. And he said, you know, the telecoms industry, one of the reasons they're so powerful is not just that they're really concentrated, although that's really important because not a lot of people have to agree for the telecoms industry to have a common position. But they're just really cozy, right? Like there's only four or five companies in an industry and they're all like, and it's been that way for several years. You know, if you're an exec at like Sprint, there's nowhere in the org chart for you to go up. And so you get like poached by AT&T and they make a box in the org chart. And then AT&T loses you back to Sprint, who makes a new box in the org chart to put you in, because they'll do it when they're hiring an AT&T executive, but not promoting a Sprint executive. Do you have people like John Legere, the un-CEO of T-Mobile, right, who, you know, merged the company with Sprint, who said, you know, I'm not like any of these other people and I'm not like any of the, and my company's not like any of these other companies. He was like an AT&T and Sprint executive before he was a T-Mobile executive, who then like merged with those companies, right? It's like, these aren't the Montague's and the Capulets, right? Like Cheryl Sandberg is not the bitter enemy of Google. Google and Facebook are not at each other's throat. Cheryl Sandberg is a senior Googler who is now the second most senior Facebooker. And you know, like maybe the reason Bob Iger and Rupert Murdoch were able to merge Disney and Fox, those two great polar opposites of our media empires, because they were star-crossed lovers who secretly yearned for one another. Or maybe their differences were completely cosmetic. And they both agreed that what we really need is to have all of our industry structured by a couple, three great men, right? Like they basically got iron-ran brain worms. And you know, that is, I think, become, what's become of our internet and our other industries. And I mentioned Tim Wu here. And the reason I mentioned Tim Wu is not just because he's an old friend. We went to elementary school together. We've known each other since we were shooting each other with crossbows and Dungeons and Dragons games when we were nine years old. But also because Tim is now in charge of tech antitrust at the White House. And we are living through a moment that I think gets lost in these discussions about copyright or harassment or you know, culture war stuff or policies about censorship and so on, which is that the common thread between all of these is not that the people who run the internet have bad judgment, although they assuredly do. It's that there's a group of people who run the internet unaccountably. And the most important thing that's going on in our politics right now is the change in antitrust law. Between Lena Kahn at the FTC and Cantor at the Department of Justice, Wu in the White House, Vishtagar in the European Commission, the stuff that's going on with the competition and markets authority in the UK, new thoughts about antitrust in China and India all over the world, we are finally starting to talk about whether or not it is healthy for the nervous system of the 21st century to be presided over by a handful of unaccountable dorks who are no better or worse than you and me. They're just like ordinary mediocrities who happen to lack the moral compass that prevents people from becoming monopolists. And you know, there are people on my side who say this is no good because what's really happening is the telecoms and entertainment companies are hoping to nerf the power of tech. And that's totally true. They are 100% on this. But they're making an incredibly stupid bargain or a bet rather. You know, big telco and big content are betting that we can wake up the antitrust giant for 40 years in a coma, get it to smash big tech, let them pick up the pieces and absorb it, and then it will go back to sleep. And the reality is that when we wake the antitrust sleeping giant from its coma, we will turn it against every one of those monopolies. And the way that we'll wake it from its coma is by having all the people are harmed by every kind of monopoly, the two companies that own all the beer and the four companies that do all the shipping and the one company that owns all the cheerleading uniforms. And you know, you name it, it's all being organized under a handful of companies that are just as venal and corrupt and corrupting as the tech industry and as the entertainment industry. We're all going to make a coalition. And we're going to we're going to send that giant out to smash these other giants, it will be the people's giant. Because we we are do ourselves an enormous disservice when we brief for say the tech giants to fight the entertainment giants. Because you know, if they win, they're not going to drop crumbs from their plates onto the floor for us. All they're going to do is increase their own share of things. We need a people's giant. And I think we're on the verge of getting one. Yeah. So that is I think one of the the answers to like, what is what is going to have to happen now in this current environment. And I'd love to explore what some of the other answers are in terms of like the future of online activism, as well as other ways that we can counter this concentrated monopoly power. But before I go there, I did promise the panelists that we would take questions from the audience in between. And if there are questions from the audience that relate to specifically what happened back in 2012. And that would be a great question to a great point to put one of those questions in between here. Isaac, do we have any any questions that relate to the this of a blackout itself and what happened there? Yeah, thanks, Eric. We do a few. The first one was asking whether the panel could reflect on the question of who benefited and how from the blackout and the examples given the Google participate because of the do no evil, or because there is a business interest. And what ways was Google's interest different from Twitter and Facebook's interest to, as you mentioned, did not actually participate? Just quickly, Google did benefit. And that's why they participated. But of course, when you align with that interest, and you're fighting for the right answer for putting power, distributing power, and I think it was still the right answer, then you can't help. But when having people who are companies whose interests also align. But I think whenever we're looking at policies, we're looking at policies that are structurally against arbitrary power, and for distributing and making sure and ensuring powers decentralized. So oftentimes that is the best way to figure out whether or not something is important who benefits in the end. Not to say that Google hasn't exploited that and also gained a lot of power outside of or beyond that using all different kinds of methods, but we'll get to that. And I'll let you ask questions. I said, do we have other questions? Yeah, the next one both has kind of a clarification piece, but I think there's a broader question to it as well. And the clarification piece, which was addressed a little bit in the notes document, is were visitors from outside the United States included in the blackout? But I think the larger question there was, what was the reasoning for this? Was collateral damage minimized or international exposure somehow desirable here? It was definitely desirable to have international exposure here. It was really a global moment. It was not a United States moment. And as Mishi pointed out earlier, it was something that had echoes and reverberations like for policy discussions that happen around the world. In fact, the silver blackout in English Wikipedia discussions about it was directly informed by a blackout that happened on Italian Wikipedia a few months before related to a specific legislation. So it was very much a moment that wasn't specific to the United States, but a point in time for the whole internet to say this is a big deal because the consequences unavoidably would have been global. Do we have other questions for the panelists? Yeah, I think related to that, the Italian blackout was also mentioned. But there is a question, I guess Mishi, you had said such a blackout wouldn't be possible today. And they were just looking for clarification as to why you feel that way. Thank you. I think I just have to point it out that it was so successful what people achieved in 2012 with the SOPA PIPA blackout that the states, the governments all caught up with it. And now they turn off the internet to prevent people from making a point. So one of the things that has happened in this period is that internet shutdowns, which are the inverse of the black square days have become a feature of the net. And because states and governments are big and paviful, there are many and we are few, this has become more common than the protests. It was ultimately designed to co-opt. That's why I spend as much time in our organization tracking on internet shutdowns and worrying about government's attempt to keep people from making any points these days, as I do in helping the people who try to use the net to make a point and are pressed upon the governments. During the COVID years from 2020 till date, which are still COVID years, but government of India shut down internet 245 times. And this is the world's largest democracy. And I live in two countries, which is the U.S. and I was born in India and go back and forth. But I have to say the future markets for all the companies are not here. They are in that part of the world now, which has 492 million WhatsApp users and 925 million feature phone users. So we haven't even gone to all the people who can be converted to smartphones. And the longest internet shutdown was 552 days of internet deprivation in Kashmir. And this is not an authoritarian government. This is a democratic government. That's why I say that you, yeah. And that's why I say that what could happen that time, it's not going to happen now. It's also because a point which Kori was making is that the pathologies of politics and society in a platform world are becoming much more evident to the global population. And the attention is increasingly being focused on the oligopoly of platform companies that they have too much power and they do. And there is a time to be allies with them. And there is a time when you also have to grapple with where the power and the marriage is live. And the top down structures of government control that is contemplated as responses to the power of these companies will only drive over privileged management of these companies into marriages of brutal convenience with these forced truth politicians whose rise these companies have enabled. So that's why I say what could happen that time we are living in a very different world right now. And I don't want to say that I am not hopeful because there are a lot of good things also which can happen. But any good activism or any good strategy begins with a proper assessment of what we are facing right now. And what we are facing is very different scenarios of different walls of all the people who they talked about. Europe does take the lead on regulation and they think that regulation is how they can address these problems. And because US is the center of the world, they will keep on discussing these things till everybody comes home because innovation, innovation, innovation and China, China, China. And rest of the world because policy moves not progressively towards a safer and more private digital society, but in destructive cycles of recurrent amnesia in which bad ideas are resurrected only to die again of the conflict between political mythology and technical reality. So everyone else will keep copying all the bad ideas and say you know what the Americans are doing if the Europeans are doing it, why can't we do it? And all the good ideas they can completely and conveniently ignore because we don't have the same enforcement structures as the Europeans have. The Europeans don't have any companies to show for innovation. And the recent actions have also told us that now Russia, China, Iran have their own internet. India can't even make up its mind despite the fact that it is a democracy. It has all this educated young people who are not only the back end of these companies, but now leading these companies and all of us are still figuring it out whether our fights are going to be tinier and smaller or they're going to be larger and global in a way where the leadership may not come from the places we are used to for those to be coming from. Sorry, that was a very long-winded answer to one question about clarification. It's all good. Thank you. Thank you, Michi. And we are getting close to the next time that we have today, but I do want to make sure that we and this is in fact a very good moment to do so. We talk about like the legislation that is actively under debate right and also reflect on like what has changed? Like how do we need to counter this kind of legislation today? So there are of course in the United States pieces of legislation that are going to potentially harm the internet because they always are. Like any moment in time, the last 10 years you would have voted, is there any pending legislation that would be bad for the internet? Yes, there is, but there's particularly bad pending legislation right now. There's the Earned Act which would potentially harm or limit the ability of internet users to use end-to-end encryption. And then there's the Smart Copyright Act which you may have received an email from Fight for the Future today about potentially mobilizing online protests against that. Specifically, when it comes to the Smart Copyright Act and the campaign that Fight for the Future is organizing about that. Tiffany, can you talk a little bit about that? And also I would be curious in that context about your take on whether the strategies of the Civil Blackout are repeatable or not. Yeah, thanks. Yes, today is the day where we push back against the censorship filter bill which is the Smart Act as Eric mentioned. And that's another on-off switch that in some ways feels a little more similar to SOPA than other bills have felt or are shaped around because it actually makes it so that any website, in particular small websites, will have to comply with installing a filter that would sort of police and scan content and stop content from being uploaded before the world gets to assess whether or not it actually is infringing material and is not art itself. That and Wikimedia, I believe, is participating in helping to make sure that Congress is aware that the Internet is here, still here. Internet users are here and paying attention and are looking for these giant scams and the bigger the scam, the bigger the outcry. And if it moves along, then I think the outcry will be even bigger. And I think that goes to what Cori and Misha were talking about. I think we're in a completely different stage of communications where the Internet, during the days of SOPA, the Internet was such that it was about preserving or making sure we have the opportunity for hundreds of thousands, millions of people to have websites or blogs or properties to talk to express themselves and to make things and build things. Now we're in a stage and I think that's why SOPA had such a response. I think these days we're talking about an Internet that makes people feel mostly conflicted about what side to be on because right now fighting for the Internet also feels like you're just fighting for big tech, which makes no sense to most people and protest is blocking out your social media profile. And that doesn't quite feel like a real protest either. There is no damage that anyone really feels when that happens. So I think we're in a stage where when we talk about all of the problems and the media is so good at freaking out about this. And I think journalists have a responsibility here as well as the intelligentsia or whatever that they focus on the harms within these platforms that are disproportionate, in a disproportionate way to actually scale the problem. And I think it behooves all of us who have some privilege to think about what actually we should be working on and what will lead to a large-scale response and reform or change for in the right direction of what is actually more harmful. And not that those problems shouldn't be solved within their silos and that we obviously need more activism in general to sort of lift the veil of the narrative on disinformation and all of that stuff in censorship, etc. But we actually need people to we need dedicated groups of people who are actually thinking about the real the larger scale harm which is that governments and monopolies are getting more and more powerful to the point where using data and in particular over data and surveillance are synonymous in my mind. The more surveillance we're allowing to be installed and to exist, the greater the power of the most most irresponsible and corrupt institutions and players grow off of and historically are the major actors who actually do the most harmful things and pit people against each other. So you know the minority group targeting in China, Russia shutting down protests, these are these are giant harms that tilt the balance of the mechanisms that we have for democracy towards these extremely strong powers that once they get that much power it's almost too hard to fight. I mean China is one of our biggest problems and because of their surveillance happens like this. So yeah it's when we talk about where we are with the internet and whether or not we can have another blackout it's what is the thing we actually should be fighting for that is has the gravity and scale and of an actual problem for humanity that sets us up on the wrong course and I think when we I think we're everybody on this panel is seeing a really similar problem or agrees on where that scale is and I think we're going to get there it's just we spend too much time in the media focusing on or getting people to freak out on things that will resolve humans work out and humans focus on see problems where they focus and they fix them but there's a responsibility to think about and work towards the larger scale problems of actually giving that much surveillance and data and so empower to really unaccountable and large institutions. Thank you so much Tiffany and thank you to all our panelists for this this rich discussion. I think that the themes that have emerged here are one and this rise of unaccountable platform power and how we respond to it both by fighting monopolies by breaking monopolies and also frankly by building rebuilding the free and open internet like the so-called blackout as we pointed out here was like a unique moment in the history of the internet and I really encourage everyone who is not that familiar with that history to study it because it is an important part of our collective record and our collective memory but at the same time as we've said here today that the landscape is changing the world is changing and we need to respond to the threats of today differently like whether it is by directly joining a campaign to break up tech giants or whether it is by making your social media account on mastone as opposed to Twitter like joining alternative platforms and helping them grow nurturing back to health the free and decentralized internet that seems to be slowly but gradually dying away. You have some options for all of you to explore and I hope some of those points will come up later again today in the course of this event. Thank you again all for joining us today. Thank you very much it was great to see you all. Yeah thank you so much. Thank you for putting this together thanks everyone. Thanks everyone for this amazing really amazing panel. Am I audible or should I turn off my video? I had some problems before. Great thank you. So thanks Eric thanks Tiffany thanks Corey thanks Mishi. For me this was I learned a lot and I might not be the only one who feeds a bit down after this but thank you for fighting for keeping the internet as good as it still is at least and making it even better. I was hopeful just to make it clear. And thanks for keeping up the hope. Thanks for that but I guess we anticipated a bit of this dynamic and that's why as a next point on the menu we have more music. So Udme welcome back.