Behind Your Business

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act have come a long way in the past few months, and recently many web hosting providers publicly denounced both of the controversial bills. The Internet community as a whole has stepped up its efforts to protest, including a planned blackout for this Wednesday; even the White House has said it won’t stand behind either PIPA or SOPA as is.

On Monday, SOPA author Rep. Lamar Smith dropped the DNS blocking provision from the bill, and it was reported that the voting would be delayed until other concerns with SOPA were quashed. While many say this delay will be the kiss of death for SOPA, PIPA could still be passed, and it could come into law very soon.

Industry organizations like the Save Hosting coalition may have helped to plant the seed of doubt, but the work is not done yet. The WHIR caught up with Save Hosting co-founder and ServInt chief operating officer Christian Dawson to talk about progress on SOPA and PIPA. In an email interview, Dawson talks about a web host’s role in politics and outlines the next steps in the anti-SOPA/anti-PIPA movement.

WHIR: Where are we at with SOPA and PIPA compared to the summer when you spoke at Hosting Con? Who has come on board? Has the public response changed?

Christian Dawson: We are in a period now where each day seems to bring new news. This is a hot button issue right now. When we first spoke at HostingCon SOPA didn’t yet exist, only PIPA, and nobody was really talking about it. In the past nine months we have worked really hard to try to get people informed, and our industry engaged in this fight. To be honest, I had no idea we’d get this far or make this much of a difference.

I can tell you from firsthand experience that politicians actually want to hear from our industry. the feedback I have received has largely been “Where have you guys been? We’ve needed you!” I have met with dozens of Congressional staff members, Senators and Representatives, and have found them all to be thoughtful, engaged and very interested in our industry and its perspectives. I’ve discovered that our industry has many friends in Congress, and that our engagement really makes a difference.  In many cases, it has actually changed minds.

In addition to being able to directly lobby Congress, the Save Hosting Coalition has put together advertising campaigns, petitions and speaking engagements. I just got back from CES where I spoke out against PIPA and SOPA. I got a real sense there of just how much this PIPA/SOPA debate has entered the cultural mainstream. I am used to this issue being something I pontificate at length on to half-engaged audiences. These days, I feel like people are starting to wake up and realize how important these issues are. We still aren’t seeing much “big media” coverage of PIPA/SOPA, but the Internet community has really started coming together to fight for their lives.

I’ve been impressed at how much support Save Hosting Coalition has received. From hundreds of “guy in his basement” shops to companies like (and including) Rackspace — we’ve got the whole industry represented and speaking out on this issue. The Save Hosting Coalition is now working on new websites, new videos, and a new project we’ll be announcing next month that we hope will make a big impact on the industry as a whole. I believe that we’ve built something that can go much further than just the fight over PIPA and SOPA; I think we’ve built something that can help pursue and protect the interests of our industry as it grows and matures. I’m not sure that could have happened without the catalyst that the threat of SOPA/PIPA has provided. The one ‘silver lining’ to PIPA and SOPA may be that these terrible bills brought the Internet industry together, and we’re planning on staying that way.

WHIR: Save Hosting recently delivered letters to Congress denouncing SOPA and PIPA. What happens now? Can you give a general timeline for the legislation?

CD: This is fast-moving legislation, and its status is continually changing — but there is one very important date everybody needs to know about right now: January 24th.

Right now, PIPA is being held up by a procedural measure, called a “hold” that was placed by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR). The day after Save Hosting Coalition met with Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS) and the Chief of Staff from Sen. Maria Cantwell’s (D-WA) office, Sens. Cantwell, Moran and Rand Paul (R-KY) joined the hold. I can’t tell you how excited we were to be a part of securing their support. This hold effectively keeps the bill from floor debate and an up-or-down vote — which is something we want because it will give us more time to educate legislators on why PIPA would be bad for the industry — and for the nation.

Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) plans to call what’s called a “cloture” vote on January 24th to end the hold and bring PIPA to floor vote ASAP. It takes 60 votes to win a cloture vote. Voting for cloture doesn’t mean you approve of the bill, it just means you think it should be brought up for a vote.

Once PIPA is brought to the floor, it is likely to pass. PIPA has 40 bipartisan co-sponsors and only needs 51 votes. If PIPA passes, we can expect the House of Representatives to shift its strategies away from SOPA and towards just passing its own version of PIPA.

All this means that the game of dominoes could start on January 24th and end very quickly if things don’t go our way. If PIPA is closed for debate on the 24th it will likely pass the Senate soon thereafter. It could end up being law in no time, regardless of what happens to SOPA.

SOPA, on the other hand, seems to be breathing its last breath. Although Rep. Smith has indicated that he’ll remove the controversial DNS blocking provisions of the bill, we’ve heard that the bill is so poisoned, hearings won’t resume, essentially killing the bill. That’s a huge victory for our side.

The latest news is that it looks like this week we will see authors of both PIPA and SOPA drop the controversial DNS provisions of their bills. This is a phenomenal development, a direct result of the Internet community pushing hard against these bills. Unfortunately, eliminating these provisions will not fix all of the problems that these bills present to the hosting industry. Make no mistake: even after any DNS-related changes, both SOPA and PIPA will still need many fixes before the hosting industry can sign off on them as good policy.

There were supposed to be hearings run by Rep. Darrell Issa next week, but they were postponed after SOPA author Rep. Lamar Smith announced the DNS drop on SOPA. Once we see that amendment we’ll see how quickly things start moving again on SOPA, if indeed they ever do. My strong belief is that SOPA is a fight we have won. For that reason, all eyes really need to be on PIPA right now.

WHIR: After GoDaddy announced its support for SOPA and then retracted it, other web hosts came out with their official stance. Do you think that this series of events helped raise SOPA awareness?

CD: GoDaddy didn’t really announce its support, per se — it was more a matter of them saying they’d been working closely with legislators to develop parts of the legislation from the get-go. I have tremendous mixed feelings about what happened to GoDaddy. Save Hosting disagreed strongly with their position on SOPA, and when the boycott occurred it made SOPA a public issue, which we’d wanted for a long long time.

But at the end of the day we needed to stand in opposition to the GoDaddy boycott. SOPA obviously has many, many supporters, most of them outside our industry. Picking on one inside of it, and then not assuming the best and forgiving them once they changed their stance, was counterproductive and didn’t make us look like “the good guys” in the debate. Personally, I got the sense that the people who were piling on GoDaddy felt that GoDaddy deserved it because their SOPA retraction wasn’t “genuine” enough.  I was never comfortable with people seeming to think that they had the right — or the mind-reading skill set — to make a call there. At the end of the day, SOPA was never going to succeed or fail on whether GoDaddy’s support for it stood.

WHIR: Do you think that most web hosts would have talked about it without this push?

CD: Most web hosting providers are, and should be, focused on their businesses 24/7. They don’t have time for politics. I don’t either, really. I am extremely lucky to have a great management team at ServInt that’s allowed me to take the time to play a modest role in this fight.

As an industry we haven’t been all that politically active. We haven’t had to be –  the government has seen our industry is a shining beacon of growth in an otherwise stagnant economy and hasn’t wanted to regulate that away. But now that this is obviously changing, our industries will need to have one eye on public policy the same way that other industries do.

I think if it wasn’t the GoDaddy issue it was going to be something. At some point, some incident was going to open eyes and get people talking. I’m just glad people are talking now.

WHIR: Websites, apps and browser plug-ins have been developed to detect and label companies that support SOPA. What do you think of these tools?

CD: The tools that identify companies that support SOPA and PIPA are really only going to be used by activist-minded people who are already invested in this debate. I don’t see tools like that going “mainstream.” For their audience, I’d say these tools are fine, as it’s completely reasonable for people to vote with their pocketbook and do business with companies who support their values.

The tools that really concern me are the ones that are being designed to specifically circumvent the blocks placed on sites by legislation like PIPA and SOPA. SOPA and PIPA are designed primarily to shut off access to infringing websites by cutting off access to their hosting, their bank account, their advertising, and (at least at the moment) their DNS. Real infringers will have backups of each on hand, and potentially dishonest web users will continue to build tools to circumvent new rules. It’s only the wrongly accused and the innocent, that will be ill-prepared and hence most greatly harmed. Ultimately, this fact will result in the business community losing a great deal of faith in the trustworthiness of the Internet as a place where they can do business. And that will really hurt tech businesses, jobs and innovation.

WHIR: Why should someone who does not own an Internet company care about SOPA and PIPA?

CD: If you own an Internet company, SOPA and PIPA are about two things:

Boycotts and lawsuits.

Boycotts, because people love their websites. The GoDaddy boycott will be a foreshadowing of things to come. When hosts bring down popular websites, even if they’re responding to court orders, you can expect a culture of boycotting to arise that will significantly damage our industry as a whole.

You’ll also see an explosion of lawsuits because — from my perspective — the largest issue with these bills has always been the “right of private action.” “Private action” essentially means that anybody — not just the government — can sue any web site owner, or host for that site, for making intellectual property theft possible.  If you’re a host, and a competitor of yours wants to shut you down, these bills would give them the right to accuse your customers of hosting illegal content — and to sue *you* for being an accomplice to that crime.  This right of private action, coupled with the bills’ “anti-circumvention” provisions, will lead to SOPA or PIPA being used as tools to bring lawsuits against domestic Internet providers. At the end of the day, that’s what threatens hosting providers most about these laws.

Proponents of these bills say that they are exclusively targeting foreign rogue websites. No matter what their intentions, it won’t work that way in practice. Under current law, the DMCA, we are seeing a ton of fraud, a ton of anti-competitive use, and a ton of “nuisance lawsuits” brought against hosting providers to try to secure quick cash settlements.  Penalties under PIPA and SOPA are far more destructive and long-lasting — so if the same proportion of SOPA/PIPA takedown requests are fraudulent, or just misinformed — we could see an astonishing number perfectly legal online businesses shut down.  Again, the effect this would have on the growth of the internet economy would be chilling.

If you don’t own an Internet company, know that your favorite websites are at risk of being shut down whether they did something or not – and know that the cost of your Internet access, hosting and more is likely to go up as Internet companies struggle to adapt to a new lawsuit-heavy environment.

If you love the Internet and what it is doing for the world, you know that these unintended consequences of SOPA and PIPA could be real industry killers. We’re all against piracy, but there are smart ways and dumb ways to fight it. The SOPA/PIPA way will have innocent websites shut off regularly, and will raise the cost of doing business across the board without ever effectively catching any pirates. It’s an expensive government overreach that risks American jobs in an industry that’s currently growing at 20 percent a year- – a figure we’d love to see grow rather than shrink.

WHIR: Now that people are more aware of SOPA, how will Save Hosting adapt to make sure people know about PIPA too?

CD: It’s funny, this all started with PIPA, but fewer people were listening. Then SOPA arrived on the scene, far worse than PIPA, and it scared people into action. Now we’ve made real progress on SOPA, so much so that PIPA now seems to be the bigger threat. So yes, definitely, we’re on it. Sign up for updates at savehosting.org.