Ancient History: The Unlikely Defeat of SOPA/PIPA

In a 2013 talk, Aaron Swartz told the story of how the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) went from unstoppable to dead on arrival thanks to the unexpected might of a mass of unaffiliated individuals organizing against it on the internet.

It was this irrational fear that things were out of control. Here was this man, a United States senator, and those people on the Internet, they were just mocking him. They had to be brought under control. Things had to be under control. And I think that was the attitude of Congress. And just as seeing that fire in that senator’s eyes scared me, I think those hearings scared a lot of people. They saw this wasn’t the attitude of a thoughtful government trying to resolve trade-offs in order to best represent its citizens. This was more like the attitude of a tyrant. And so the citizens fought back.

Yet despite the victory, his talk ended with a foreboding and prophetic admonishment.

It’s kind of hard to believe this story. Hard to remember how close it all came to actually passing. Hard to remember how this could’ve gone any other way. But it wasn’t a dream or a nightmare, it was all very real. And it will happen again.

And we (still) can’t let that happen.

DAAMLA is SOPA/PIPA for Web3

SOPA/PIPA—the irrationally-fearful crackdown legislation Aaron Swartz helped defeat—is ancient history to most, if it is remembered at all. Yet just as Aaron predicted, its engineers are not gone, and they are if anything more irrationally fearful than ever before.

Enter the Digital Asset Anti-Money Laundering Act (DAAMLA)—proof, in the form of internet-breaking legislation—that irrationality grows exponentially relative to the fear that inspires it.

While the original freedom-to-connect-eviscerating policy frameworks embodied by SOPA and PIPA masqueraded as copyright protection for the digital age—DAAMLA is cloaked in fear of a Digital Frankenstein’s monster of crypto-fueled cybercrime, terrorism and fraud. Under the hood, however, is a policy framework only a banking-industry-captured senator could love.

TLDR? The threat is real.

Still not convinced? Dig a little deeper into the SOPA/PIPA/DAAMLA psychosis, and you will begin to see a common underlying theme: a killing stroke to the freedom to connect—a fundamental pillar of the digital age.

Unspooling the Common Thread

SOPA/PIPA and DAAMLA share the same underlying motive: an impulse to take away each individual’s freedom to connect under the guise of consumer protection and regulatory zeal. SOPA and PIPA were once anointed as necessary shields against copyright infringement, but were in essence tools capable of inducing takedown-first-ask-questions-later rapid internet censorship, and of stifling digital creativity by imposing a liability risk on any site daring enough to permit users to speak and share freely.

Similarly, DAAMLA, while ostensibly aiming to prevent crypto-enabled regulatory evasions of any kind, veils an assault on how individuals are permitted to engage with one another on peer-to-peer, permissionless network protocols (a.k.a. crypto)—a set of technologies epitomizing the ethos of our personal digital freedom as individuals enhanced and expanded via the power of decentralized networks to diffuse the influence and control that can be exerted on us by the powerful.

The Price of Inaction

SOPA and PIPA threatened to morph the internet from a bastion of free expression into a controlled space, dominated by surveillance and censorship. DAAMLA looms over the world of private, decentralized transactions mediated by blockchain technology in the same way.

By enforcing stringent regulations typically reserved for large institutions on individuals and communities trying to build in the crypto space, possible futures are severely curtailed. Not incidentally, all of those foreclosed possible futures are those without a role for centralized management by authoritarian planners and the deputized intermediaries through which they project power by means of gatekeeping, censorship and surveillance over an ever-growing list of tools and services crucial to the basic business of living out our lives.

And as with all policy crafted in irrational fear, its anticipable disparate impacts are unjust, bureaucratically barbaric and passive-aggressively brutal.

While right now it seems that crypto is only about finance—finance is just the first most obvious application for a technology that could, applied the right way, eliminate the need for intermediaries altogether across all of the most important channels of interaction on the internet—present and future.

To the overlords of our crumbling institutions, this poses a fundamental threat to the way they have grown accustomed to projecting power—and as entrenched oligarchs do in such circumstances, they treat it as a threat to sovereign power itself—rather than the mere threat to the customs they prefer and find most comfortable it actually represents.

And if we attempt to find middle ground with their madness, we will be sacrificing with certainty far more than we merely risk by fighting DAAMLA tooth and nail, as we once did SOPA and PIPA.

Privacy: The First Casualty

Privacy, the cornerstone of individual freedom, stands to be the first casualty in this legislative onslaught. DAAMLA’s demands for extensive personal data collection and reporting mirror the privacy concerns raised during the SOPA/PIPA era. These acts collectively demonstrate a wanton disregard for the intrusive reality of surveillance in the digital domain, infringing upon the right to privacy and secure, anonymous digital interactions.

The Freedom to Create and Publish Code: the Second Casualty

The freedom to create and publish code, the lifeblood of digital progress, is also at stake. SOPA and PIPA were widely criticized for the inevitable stifling of creative expression online they would’ve wrought. And while DAAMLA may superficially target a different domain, its obvious effects are not merely practically indistinguishable—they are far, far more draconian.

By imposing traditional financial regulations on a fundamentally new technological paradigm built on open source code and the right to publish and run it, the act will wipe out the means by which technologies that could redefine the very nature of transacting and interacting digitally come into being. I do not exaggerate when I say that open source software and the permissionless right to create and share it is at stake.

Coupled with other contemporary assaults on our freedom of expression online (and crypto’s proven capacity to defend free expression of just those other kinds), it will mean the end of digital free expression altogether if we fail—or worse—if we just watch it happen passively, taking no action at all.

Conclusion: A Watchman’s Shout in the Night

In conclusion, while SOPA/PIPA and the DAAMLA dress themselves in the garb of protective legislation, their true impact lies in the realm of restricting digital freedom. These legislative efforts, though seemingly disparate, converge on a singular point: the sundering of our freedom to connect, share, and innovate in the digital space.

Or as Julian Assange put it:

It is time to take up the arms of our new world, to fight for ourselves and for those we love. If we do not, the universality of the internet will merge global humanity into one giant grid of mass surveillance and mass control.

Our task is to secure self-determination where we can, to hold back the coming dystopia where we cannot, and if all else fails, to accelerate its self-destruction.

I for one believe it isn’t too late to repeat history and defeat DAAMLA. As with SOPA/PIPA, the odds are long and our list of allies is short.

Yet one thing remains certain—we can’t let this happen.

So I say we fight. What say you?