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>> I should start by saying I'm trained as a geophysicist,
not a political scientist or a lawyer.
But I'm going to pretend to be a political scientist today and I'm not going
to get too much into details of the SOPA legislation implications for the internet,
although I've spent a lot of time on that over the last six months both in my work
with the Internet Society and with the IEEE.
Instead I'm going to speculate a little bit on what this latest episode means in terms
of political process going forward so I am going to try to pretend to be a political scientist.
I work with political scientists at Georgetown, where I'm an adjunct professor
in internet studies in the Communication, Culture and Technology Program.
We have a number of students who are doing Master's Theses on issues related to this,
how is the internet changing politics?
But the reason I'm here I think is because prior to joining IBM and working
in the private sector I spent 10 years in government so I worked with Senator Gore back
when he was chairman of the science subcommittee.
>> Back when he was inventing the internet.
>> On my tombstone it will say here lies Mike Nelson,
he helped Al Gore not invent the internet.
[laughter] As a point of interest, tomorrow we're celebrating the 20th anniversary
of the legislation he wrote that helped accelerate the growth,
the backbone of the internet.
And it's going to be webcast.
It's an all day conference at the museum as a celebration of NITRD, n-i-t-r-d,
which is the group that the bill set up to help coordinate work.
It should be a fascinating conference.
I don't know if they'll address the question you just raised.
I also worked at the White House with Gore about four years and the first thing I learned
when I came to Washington, after MIT, was that there are two types of power in Washington.
There's the power to stop something and there's the power to get something done.
And there's a lot more people who have the first type of power.
What we saw with this SOPA today was a lot of grassroots organizations that came together
to use the first type of power, they stopped the process.
The question for me is how can these grassroots efforts get the second type of power?
Which is a lot harder to get, how can they actually help push things forward?
And what's starting to happen, I think, is my thesis today,
is we're starting to see online mechanisms that will allow the grassroots community,
the Neitzens just push things forward that they want, rather than just trying
to stop things, put in roadblocks.
The other thing I learned in Washington the very first week I was on the job is
that it's essential that you always have a good bumper sticker.
[laughter] And the corollary is never get on the wrong side of a bad bumper sticker.
And I think the content really did on this one.
The grassroots community was mobilized because they heard that SOPA meant that someone is going
to censor through the internet, here and abroad.
They heard that this was going to break the internet
and that was certainly the message the technical community got because of the provisions
to change the domain name system.
And then the last thing that really pushed a lot of hot buttons was this bill was going
to require the ISP's to look at every packet I sent.
And so it raised all sorts of privacy implications and the like.
And when you're on the wrong side of three powerful bumper stickers,
three emotional bumper stickers, it's pretty tough to win.
The other problem, of course, was the legislation was vague.
I don't think the problem was due process provisions, in other words,
what's technically feasible, what sites are targeted and will a site
that has a million users, 10 of them are doing something illegal, be closed down?
All these were unanswered questions that the supporters of the bill didn't really focus on.
And so this did allow a lot of people, not just coordinated efforts,
but a lot of individual users to become part of the debate.
This has been framed as a Silicon Valley versus Hollywood debate but the really important player
who got involved in these last few months was the user community,
the citizens of the internet, as you say.
So the question for the future is how will this change the process?
I think the big thing that will change, as you pointed out,
is the process is going to have to change.
The other bumper sticker that really mobilized people was this SOPA bill was drafted in secret.
There wasn't consultation with the technical community.
The technical community couldn't find anybody who had been part of the discussions
about the domain name provisions, for instance.
So that was, I think that will change.
I think the other thing that's going to change is that the grassroots efforts are going
to get away from the kind of bazooka approach.
When I was on the Hill the thing we always dreaded was the postcard campaigns.
You know somebody would write an article in the Sierra Club or Ducks Unlimited or someplace
and say you know send this postcard in
and suddenly we'd have 5,000 post cards that we had to send a reply to.
And all it said was just stop this bill or just one or two sentences.
It didn't impress anybody really because people just had not thought
about the issue and just sent it in.
So what's different I think is that we are going to see a lot more concerted efforts
to give constructive feedback and actually explain why people are,
I worry that we are going to see more attacks like Anonymous, this denial of service attack
and then that's not helpful either.
But what I think is exciting is the more targeted approach.
One thing that we're seeing is that the grassroots are realizing that it's about policy
and politics and they're starting to target the election campaigns of specific members.
This is really interesting.
So Paul Ryan, who hadn't really taken a concrete position on SOPA,
suddenly found that his opponent was getting a bunch of money from the net citizens.
The person who is running against Lamar Smith in the Republican primary, is a hardcore,
Ron Paul loving, Tea Party, gun toting Sheriff, who is now getting all this money from all
around the country, mostly in $15 and $50 increments,
but that wakes up a member pretty quickly.
Suddenly a person who is nowhere, totally unknown, starts getting 100's of contributions
because of the decision on a particular bill.
And the last thing I wanted to point to is that I think things like the Madison Project,
which Darrel Issa has created to allow anybody anywhere to make comments on the Open Act,
which was introduced as an alternative to SOPA and PIPA,
is another way in which the grassroots are starting to get specific, starting to target
and really complain at a granular level, rather than just staying oh, stop SOPA,
and that might provide them with some of the power to push things forward.
Of the 100 comments already on the Open Act, about six have already been embedded
and discussed and incorporated into a new draft.
And this might, this could be very positive.
It could change the dynamic.
There's a lot of people very upset about the process right now.
We've got Larry Lesing's new book called Republic Lost.
There's a similar book called Greedy ***.
Jack Abramoff is now crusading against corruption.
[laughter] So the stage is set.
And if somebody was able to take some of these issues and wrap it
into an effective political campaign, they'd get 10% of the vote pretty quickly.
Ron Paul is getting support partly because of these issues, the secretive process
by which lobbyists get things done in Washington.
Americans Elect is another place where we might see these issues getting a lot more discussion
and for those of you who aren't familiar, Americans Elect is an effort, well funded,
$20 million, to put a third party candidate on the ballot in every state.
And they're using the net to decide who those candidates will be
and what their positions will be.
Their aiming for the raging moderates in the middle who are fed up with the system,
the radical centrists and I think they're going to be a player in this debate.
They might actually, through the use of the net, show how participatory democracy can move
to the next level and also highlight some of the defects in the system and so on,
so aptly displayed in that whole PIPA and SOPA process.
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