GoDaddy is scrambling to do damage control

(copied from my response at http://dorkitude.com/post/14691558851/the-godaddy-victory-is...)

The GoDaddy victory is a red herring.

That GoDaddy reversed its SOPA stance (or at least its PR stance) about SOPA in the wake of our boycott is good news, but it's also distracting news. While it does demonstrate that we, the citizens of the righteous internet, can have P&L impact as consumers in the B2B world, the real and massive culprits have been B2C companies.

A very small proportion of a normal B2C company’s revenues come from policy-aware internet citizens. Tactics like the GoDaddy boycott simply will not have an impact (any more than the ongoing boycott of Wal-Mart among the idealistic).

_I don't want us to get distracted from that fact._

_Here are the questions we should be considering._

What can we do to flex our muscles before the many (far more evil) consumer-facing companies out there? How do we legally channel our energy into harming their P&L statements in an unequivocally attributable manner? What about the B2B companies over whose procurement processes we regular citizens have no control?

The companies of greatest concern should be those with contractual and/or infrastructural lock-in:

    * telecoms like AT&T and Verizon

    * ISPs/media pipes like Comcast and Dish Network

    * top-down sales companies like Microsoft and Symantec

    * conglomerate-monopolies like Adobe and Autodesk

Unless and until we find a way to hamstring those attacking monsters, the internet will always be in peril -- even if we somehow win this battle like we _barely_ won the Net Neutrality battle a few short years ago.

Politicians don't like distractions. If support for some legislation will end up causing distractions, especially during campaign season, they will take notice.

The best distractions come from primary challenges directly attributable to their stances on issues, but even having hecklers show up to campaign events can work.

The right has been using primary threats for a long time to keep politicians in line. I suspect we could be effective using this strategy as well if we put our energy where our mouth is.

So, who's next?

It's going to be immensely tougher to demonstrate power against the media moguls as directly.

I was thinking, we can safely assume theres a lot of start-up CEOs/founders/whatevers around here. What if all of these companies prominently displayed dissatisfaction with SOPA. Wouldn't this be an immediate, effective way to reach the uninformed masses?

If PG can involve politics in his company, why can't you?

I've been considering for some weeks whether I can simply go "cold turkey" on paid, mainstream media for a period of time.

When I consider this, I have enough backlog of reading and (legitimately free, e.g. SICP and the like) online videos in my mental queue to do so. I might -- really -- be better off for doing so.

I haven't formulated a well-worded proposal and scenario/approach to share, but I would suggest working towards an opt-in mainstream media blackout -- or brownout, for those who can't opt-out altogether (and that includes me as far as needing to keep up with the news and maintain an ISP connection that doesn't have a viable alternative).

This will seem too extreme to many. But I encourage you to stop and think for a minute or five what a month or two's "brownout" would look like for you, and for media companies currently trying to ramrod through SOPA et al.

Let them see what it really looks like when their U.S. (and other) revenue stream "dries up", for real -- as opposed to their claims of losses. Particularly right when they're foisting this crap on us.