Fact Blackout Day

Fun fact: the internet is nebulous and strange and sometimes even in the space of a few hours it can change considerably. The use of the internet to distribute intellectual property freely, known colloquially as piracy, has attracted numerous smear campaigns, intimidation campaigns, and lobbying campaigns. Governments are full of boomers who don't know very much about the internet, so the lobbyists have an easy time because they represent moneyed interests and bellyache about the rampant theft of video, audio, and data property.

Today a number of internet entities, most notably Wikipedia, have opted to protest upcoming US legislation that vaguely confronts the threat of internet piracy, copyright infringement, and intellectual property theft. Full understanding of the legislation is available to nerds, lawyers, and people with too much time on their hands. So far as I can simplify it: another step down the road to internet nationalization, censorship, and the death of free information.

The anti-theft team is as powerful as the net-neutrality/free-internet movement is popular. Most people don't really care either way, as long as they can get to Facebook and/or email. Most people also don't really understand the internet, or care if it gets cut up into various national zones. Who in America wants to read a Finnish webcomic, or a Chilean blog? That's a waste of time. But Finns and Chileans want American entertainment, so it's best to cut the audiences away from each other and limit the odds of pirated material being available online.

In the past, powerful entertainment corporations have volleyed multimillion dollar lawsuits at 15 year old pirates, but that Napster-era policy is outdated because nobody liked it and there is no way a teenager is going to afford legal defense fees. The new approach is preventative and cautious and roughly as imperative as the old one, but instead of going after the users of the internet or even consulting them, it just pressures the gigantic blind beast known as national government into various overbearing measures that will change the internet for the worst.

Or so I am told. The internet is already somewhat nationalized, mildly censored, and it's so full of nonsense that even if 80% of it were deleted, banned, and forgotten, there would still be far too much of it to control or monitor. So the state of the internet is that all the bluster of the last decade regarding IP laws and censorship and nationalization is actually going to come to some kind of action. For my part I have serious doubts about the usefulness or fairness of the proposed measures, and I wish all opponents of a cut-up, abused internet a conclusive victory.

But the crowd is ignorant and the corporation is indignant. That is why awareness drives like today's are important, to ensure that any lies surrounding this sordid business are dispelled.