The GoDaddy victory is a red herring.
This post is a response to a (rightfully) celebratory post written by Chris Heald on Google+. If you didn’t see it, please first read his original post here.
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 pro-SOPA 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.
