Send A Sympathy Card Over The Death Of The Internet To Your Senator

from the condolences dept

Alexis Ohanion, founder of Reddit (and Hipmunk and Breadpig), is kicking off a neat campaign to send condolence cards to Senators, mourning the “death of the internet” in response to the effort to move forward with PIPA. In a video he put together, he questions why our elected officials, who admit they don’t understand the technology, seem to have no problem at all moving forward with a bill regulating that same technology — and shows the condolence card he’s sending to his own Senators in New York.

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He separately notes how odd it is that in this era of political gridlock, where almost nothing can get done in Congress, so many in Congress jump to push through bad legislation they don’t understand — written by the entertainment industry — while ignoring the many real problems this country faces…

Because I can already hear some of the SOPA/PIPA supporters out there revving up the “but it doesn’t kill the internet!” cries, let’s dig into that issue. No one is saying that it kills off the entire internet, so that it goes away. What we’ve been saying all along is that it kills the established legal framework under which the internet has grown and thrived for decades. That’s a big deal. Multiple studies have shown that the protection from secondary liability is a large part of what enabled the internet to grow the way it did, and to build the kinds of innovative new services that have shown up over the years. Taking that away doesn’t mean that “the internet” goes away — but it does mean that the key protections on which the internet were built are put at significant risk or, in some cases, wiped out. That’s pretty scary if you want to see new internet services built up and to see existing ones grow. Under such conditions, sympathy cards seem perfectly reasonable.

Filed Under: alexis ohanion, death of the internet, pipa, protect ip, senators, sopa, sympathy card