New Media Giants Take Out Print Ad Against SOPA

itwbennett writes "Slashdot readers will recall that the SOPA hearings earlier this week 'excluded any witnesses who advocate for civil rights. Google's Katherine Oyama was the only witness to object to the bill in a meaningful way.' So to get the attention of lawmakers, new media giants Google, Facebook, and Zynga turned to the only place they knew that politicians gather daily. They took out a full page ad in the New York Times. The irony of taking out a newspaper ad to protect the Web is certainly lost on no one."

Comments

Why not use their own sites?

[Anonymous Coward]

Politicians use Google and Facebook too. Put messages there.

Heck, they could be really direct and block Google/Facebook for congressional IP ranges.

Re:Why not use their own sites?

[grcumb]

Politicians use Google and Facebook too. Put messages there.

Or you could get together with 87,834 of your closest friends and call them.

It's good to see people mobilisation en masse to oppose this bill, but as others have said, it remains to be seen whether Congress will listen to anyone unless they dangle a cheque in front of their nose.

The big danger that I see is how dangerously regressive and backward-looking attitudes on the Hill are.

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the recent House Judiciary Committee hearing was that Google, the sole opponent to the legislation allowed to present at the hearing, was castigated by most of the people there, impugned for purportedly profiting from piracy and cast as the villain in this whole affair.

Seeing one of the few growing and dynamic drivers of the information economy not only cast out of the fold but actively opposed, one can only conclude that the captains of the US media industry are perfectly content to cut their nose off to spite their face. They will burn the bridge represented by Google rather than cross it.

I see two immediate dangers if this regime is actually allowed to take the shape proposed for it:

• 1) Innovation in content re-use and sharing will move outside of the US. Some will move into the shadows (kind of like offshore pirate radio in days of yore, except the ships and radios are available for the cost of a laptop). Some will move into the less governed – or governable – areas.
• 2) US influence on innovation and invention will decline significantly. This legislative package will serve as a clear signal that Silicon Valley is no longer the influence it used to be. (Indeed, the Valley’s lack of standing in DC was evidenced by committee members’ contempt for Google throughout the hearing.)

The latter outcome is the more dangerous of the two. Losing influence in the direction the Internet’s development takes also means losing the uniquely American ethos of freedom and individualism.

There are numerous new media and technological players poised in the wings right now. But few of them (with the possible exception of Al Jazeera) have any moral stake in human rights or even individual expression. Not, at least, in the same way that many American developers do - that is, at the axiomatic level, rather than as a conscious overlay to their world view.

Re:Why not use their own sites?

[Amorymeltzer]

Go for broke, I say. Get Facebook, Wiki(m|p)edia, Youtube, and Twitter to go dark for a day. Hell, they could go dark for an hour and still the world would riot. I don't like how integral these sites have become to day-to-day life for most people, when ten years ago none even existed,[1] but for Congress to think that the people in this country or this world care one iota about "e-parasites" when put up against Honey Badger and Farmville is just bogus. Show Washington what this bill actually means for America and they'll all change. You can't get reelected on "I voted to shut down Facebook and Youtube."

1. Okay fine, Wikipedia was around, but few knew about it. Besides, it's for the sake of the narrative!

Re:Why not use their own sites?

[SuricouRaven]

There will always be something of a generational gap in politics - just as there will be in judges, or the higher ranks of military command. These are all long-term careers, where it takes decades to work your way through the ranks and make it to the top. There may be a few who manage to get ahead fast, but even Obama is fifty now. So none of those in congress grew up with computers or really understand those who did. They do understand lobbying, and economics - so for them, it's a very simply matter: Entertainment production is one of the few industries where the US not only leads the world, but also exports a lot more than it imports. That makes it economically very valuable, and so it must be defended and strengthened.

Re:Why not use their own sites?

[TheRaven64]

Nope, for the whole of America replace the page with a short notice saying that US politicians are attempting to pass laws making it easy to censor the Internet and making this kind of downtime common and provide a list of telephone numbers for the offices of all of the denizens of congress. Let the congressional switchboard be jammed with constituents' complaints for an hour or so...

Lobby

[Virtual_Raider]

Would that make any impact? This would appear the perfect moment to use all their lobbying power, clearly appealing to the masses is passe and doesn't work anymore in the US. Witness the OWS movement.

Re:Lobby

[DigiShaman]

Call me the prophet if you will (hopefully a bad one at that). Here's how I think it's going down. The president of the United States and all of congress is basically going to tell Silicon Valley to go fuck off. Their technology robs government of power and exposes their dirty laundry to the public consistently. That's a big "no no". Second, Hollywood and the rest of the entertainment industry has always been involved in US politics far longer than I've been alive. They also export their media to be consumed, not to be interactive thus providing entertaining feedback to other citizens. To allow for that robs them of a time-slice in peoples lives that could otherwise be revenue generating. You know as well as I that the gaming industry and hollywood are in direct competition with each other. Expect gaming to be heavily regulated under the guise of "addition"

In there's the bottom line. To have the RIAA and MPAA cartels wither on the vine would be a national security issue. That's how it will be spun. Being a huge export of America and all and our massive debt that needs to be paired off. So, they will subsidize the industry in one of three ways. 1: Tax breaks, 2: direct subsidies, 3: put the burden of cost on all other industries to enforce the media industry (laundered tax on citizens).

Re:Lobby

[Roogna]

Easy solution. Hollywood is great at lobbying. So the tech industry should just -buy- Hollywood. After all, the entirety of Hollywood would cost the big tech giants little really. Split it up, each tech giant can buy a studio, and just straight up fire the entire executive staff. Then going forward the media industry can lobby in a tech friendly manner.

They should get serious

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of taking out a newspaper ad, the "new media giants" should take a page out of the unions' book and go on strike. No Google. No Facebook. No YouTube. Just put up a static page all day explaining the threat this law poses to new media. That would get people's attention.

Re:So the mere fact that the industry is buying ad

[Grishnakh]

I don't think that many people will complain about corporations buying ads in newspapers to get their point out. How is it really any different from advertising? Except that while still trying to sway your opinion with their ad, they're not trying to sell you anything.

The problem with corporate "speech" is not when they spend a bunch of money on ads, it's when they hand bags of money to politicians and call them "campaign contributions". Somehow the SCOTUS equate giving money to someone as "speech", which it's not, it's a bribe. With these ads, there's zero money going from the corporations to the politicians; only the newspaper is getting any money, and we can presume they charge the same rates for these ads as they'd charge anyone else for that same ad space.

Why Ad? Old Media not reporting?

[Frans Faase]

I guess the Old Media are not reporting about this. If this law passes, it is also a victory of the Old Media, I guess, because free speech will return to where it all started: the daily newspaper.