Nicholas Carr - Piracy and Privacy

This is a spurious comparison. Restrictions on piracy are immediately visible to people. They get blocked from doing something, they pay more for music or films, they go to prison. There is a tangible effect that gets media coverage.

Privacy and the loss thereof is almost always entirely invisible. So Google, Facebook et al collect all my browsing habits and use it to sell things to me. It's not an event that can make the average person upset.

SOPA got the internets aflutter because it's something they (think they) can understand. Privacy - not so much.

This meme of "The Internet People are Organized and Powerful" is nuts and wrong.

There would have been just as much hubbub had Wikipedia decided to run a national television advert during Modern Family asking people to call Congress.

This was a lot of things, and it was certainly successful. But it wasn't because people are well organized or that there was some serious campaign management going on. There wasn't. And truth be told, efforts like this have almost a half-life to them.

Think about Howard Dean's incredible run in 2004. Where are those activists now? Or Obama's 2008 list? Where is that now?

People are fickle on the Internet and they get tired of causes quickly. And there's no "universal consensus" amongst "people on the Internet"

Long story short, should Google try and somehow protest its own interests on Privacy, I suspect that you wouldn't see nearly as much universal consensus around that as you did around SOPA. It's hard to write legislation that lopsided or dumb, and even harder to generate the kind of public panic behind it more than once.