The Corporate Hijacking of Internet Blackout Protests

The next speaker in this ECREA 2012 session is Tessa Houghton, who begins by noting the 2009 New Zealand blackout of Websites and avatars, in protest against new copyright legislation. This is a form of spectacular viral publicity, and has been repeated in a number of national contexts over the past years – variously protesting copyright or Internet regulations. The anti-SOPA/PIPA blackout of early 2012 is another example for this.

Socially mediated antagonistic publicity is increasingly characteristic for such protests; for all the differences between the specific publics involved in the protests, it highlights contemporary configurations of power. This departs from Habermasian models by building on a wide range of communication technologies and techniques, however, and represents the pluralist structures of contemporary societies.

Such protests represent creative and sometimes disruptive communicative acts, as was obvious in the SOPA/PIPA protests; a massive Internet blackout campaign was organised, following established tactical contours but enacting them on a much more global scale than has been attempted before or since, ingeniously using technology to orchestrating. The protests involved various activities from site blackouts to full-on DDoS attacks.

Such protests are centred around opinion leaders, exploit the communicative functions of Web spaces, and consciously set up a self-replicating conversion and participation cycle. Most famously, Wikipedia was blacked out for 24 hours, and many other community and individual sites followed suit; in the end, the legislation before the US Congress was defeated.

But the triumphant discourse around the protests should not be taken at face value: the participation of several major Web companies also represents a corporate hijacking of the protests. The participation of such companies supported the blackout and made it substantially more visible – but in the process, the struggle also became one between old and new media companies, with different interests in copyright protection, and worldwide protesters were thus enrolled in support a corporate agenda. The rhetoric that new media corporations are inherently the friends of Internet users succeeded in this case – but it must continue to be challenged.