GoDaddy has not withdrawn its official congressional support for SOPA

However, once thinking along those lines, I suggested what might not be useless would be using the Reddit-ish sentiment to raise money for an advertising campaign targeted specifically at the home districts of the bill's sponsors (which would be easy on Facebook). I'd suspect it'd be easy to scrape together many thousands of dollars and then to smear the bill's sponsors in their home districts.

(I haven't done this because honestly I haven't read a single page of the bill's text, don't even know what its implications are and refuse to protest something on a bandwagon.)

is followed by

"I've called each of mine and have the vapid response letters to prove it."

Slight disconnect there? =)

Don't mean to harp on it, because contacting your congresscritters is a genuinely productive way to enact change. (Just don't put a whole lot of effort writing a heartfelt argument informed with evidence and rigor--its value comes more from indicating to the politician the breadth and energy of opposition to SOPA.)

But focusing on GoDaddy isn't a distraction, either. One of the central rules of political organizing is this: you pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Victory isn't going to come in one fell swoop: if it comes at all, it will be through a loosely connected series of small victories, looking plausible only in retrospect.

GoDaddy is an easy enemy: it has an anti-charismatic founder who has a long history of general shittiness. A victory there doesn't only screw over GoDaddy, which is in the grand scheme of things not even a secondary target--its only actual goal is to make a quick buck from the feds. But what a victory does do is this: for one, it sends an obvious message to Congress and to other companies that the Internet matters: it's providing objective information that, yes, the anti-SOPA forces have some power, and other players might re-evaluate their current strategy to accomodate that new information.

But beyond that, and more important than that, is that it builds the movement. A victory sends a signal to people who are anti-SOPA but disenchanted that there is at least the hope of victory, bringing them back into the fold. It generates a bunch of news articles providing valuable anti-SOPA publicity, which is especially valuable since broader public knowledge of SOPA is one of the things we need most now. And it develops commitment and better engagement for the movement via showing how each of us as individuals can contribute to change.

It's not an either-or choice: you can both send letters and move your domains from GoDaddy.

By the way, if you're reading this and you haven't sent a letter... close out this window immediately, write a letter, and send it.

Suggesting we should only do one thing is foolish.

As a Democrat, I feel there is way too much Outrage over all kinds of relatively minor things. If you read a site like Daily Kos and see all the action going on there, it would seem that any successful legislator would have to necessarily build a tolerance to negative emails/letters/calls.

There are not, however, many issues that cause a large corporate donor to beg for mercy and forgiveness for taking a certain position. I think this action towards GoDaddy matters quite a bit in separating SOPA as something that really, truly angers people.

This GoDaddy coverage has been perfect. If anything, more people know about SOPA than would have done otherwise. If anything, the number of letters being sent will have increased, not decreased.

http://www.firstpost.com/tech/microsoft-opposes-sopa-whilst-...

Here's the thing: it's the week of Christmas. People, including elected officials and their constituents, are traveling and distracted. The likelihood of a letter-writing campaign either getting off the ground of making an impressive impact is much slimmer than usual.

Meanwhile, a very particular company is identified as supportive of the legislation. It happens that their product is broadly used by the Internet community and that said product provides recurring revenue. The loss of numerous customers, as a result, has lasting impact.

And so the community responds and makes an example of this company. Do angels sing, heralding the end of bad legislation? No. But tech news outlets, which would have had nothing substantial to print, now get to focus their full attention again on SOPA, on how a company who supports it is brutally punished, and how the Internet business community is maybe something not to be fucked with after all. So now this is part of the story: Internet folk have teeth, there are consequences for supporting bad law. The best part is that GoDaddy doesn't even have to be wounded in any real sense – the story is enough to change the tone of the conversation. This is mostly a war of perceptions, so it's good to make the bad guys look like scheming clowns.

This strikes me as an incredible deal during an otherwise dead week. What would you have preferred in its place? How would the season impact such a proposal?

> The overwhelming majority of the effort should be going to calling/sending (physical) letters to one's respective representatives, maybe setting up some sort of a fund to oppose SOPA/PIPA and support the OPEN act, urging tech companies like Google to spend more on lobbying (They can and should be spending more to lobby against the act), etc

I'm sure you don't need me to point out the multitude of wonderful, free publishing platforms you're going to be able to use to make your case for just this course of action. Meanwhile, while you're putting that all together, let's see a little gratitude for the good luck of GoDaddy's incompetence and for the time and money spent by the many domain holders who made their point so clearly.

This is gonna be hard. We, the people, are way outgunned in terms of cash and lobbying. We need every victory we can get to keep the logs rolling.

Other companies that see, "Oh shit, GoDaddy has had nearly 40,000 domains transferred and more bad PR than they can handle, maybe we shouldn't be supporting this. What if that shit hits the fan for us too?"

Making an example out of one can't be a bad thing.

Advocacy often falls into the trap of trying to act uniformly, as if there is only one appropriate action for an individual of a movement to take.

One individual does not have the capacity to decide those battles which should be fought and those battles from which we should gracefully withdraw.

This is, in fact, because every battle that we have the present capacity to fight ought be undertaken:

Unless, of course, there is only one battle upon which the war depends. But this is not so currently; your own multitude of (in my experience, only marginally important) battlefields demonstrates this.

http://www.google.com/ads/tv/

There are about a 6 threads on HN right now that mention various anti-SOPA registrars. Read a few and see what the opinions are.

Might be a case of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing.