1. This was an astounding demonstration of what the internet can do in the policy space, and we should not let it die, but leverage what came together for more.
2. This shouldn't just be reactive to things like SOPA/PIPA, but it should be a positive, proactive, long-term force for good going forward.
3. We should start discussing what kinds of positive goals we can reach for immediately.

• Joel Spolsky, with some policy ideas and a suggestion for getting around Congressional corruption by having internet companies give free online ad space to politicians who run "respectable" campaigns.
• Fred Wilson, suggesting we need an entirely new framework for thinking about copyright issues.
• Smari McCarthy, worrying that the response to SOPA/PIPA was too strong (I disagree), but also noting the need to be much more proactive going forward.
• Rick Falkvinge, also talking about going on the offensive for freedom of speech online.
• Mark McKenna, also pointing out that it's time to revisit existing copyright law and raise questions about whether it needs to be ratcheted back, rather than forward.
• Reddit user ColtonProvias tries to create organization out of chaos.
• Reddit user birdomics looks at creating a new political party for the internet -- called the Internet Party (which others suggest already exists in the form of the Pirate Party).

• Any regulation that impacts the internet needs to be data driven rather than faith-based. I've been banging this drum for ages. The evidence used to support copyright expansionism for centuries has been suspect. Yet, when one industry makes claims, politicians seem to take them at face value. That needs to stop. A key guiding point for those driving any kind of "internet agenda" going forward should be a reliance on actual, credible data. James Boyle and William Patry have both written books that highlight this, and if you haven't read them, you should.
  
  Thankfully, the UK is actually leading the way (somewhat) here, thanks to the mostly good Hargreaves report (which Boyle worked on), which the UK government has said it intends to follow. Unfortunately, while it says that, so far the actual actions when it comes to laws have remained faith-based.
  
  Some will claim that you can come up with data to support just about anything -- and to some extent that's true. But I think that it's possible for rational people to look closely at research and data and come to reasonable conclusions -- while figuring out when to dismiss conclusions that are clearly bunk or created through pure extrapolation or bad assumptions. Either way, the fact that plenty of legislation gets proposed and passed without any real evidence of a need is a huge problem.



• We need to recognize that the internet, free speech and copyright are all connected. One of the tricks for trying to pass SOPA/PIPA (and successfully passing previous bills like the ProIP Act) was to pretend that these were just laws about "arcane" legal issues like copyright -- something that "no one cares about." But in an age where (thanks to bad copyright law changes) everything you create is pretty much subject to copyright, combined with computers and networks whose main job is copying works -- we've reached a point where it's ridiculous to think that you can regulate copyright or the internet without impacting free speech.
  
  There has been a growing recognition of this, including an excellent book by Neil Netanel, and another by David Lange & Jefferson Powell, in which the conflict between copyright and free speech is discussed at length. Unfortunately, the courts have yet to really recognize this issue. The Supreme Court's ruling in Eldred nearly a decade ago is a pretty big problem here, not recognizing how the expansion of copyright law, combined with the internet, really has made copyright law and the First Amendment much more entwined. The Supreme Court completely ignores that based on some very silly reasoning -- and that ruling has lived on to haunt us until today -- such as with the Golan ruling, which came out the exact same day as the internet SOPA/PIPA protests.
  
  People who live online recognize the inherent conflict between today's copyright laws and free speech -- and recognize the risks of harming free speech through copyright expansionism. But because the two laws barely conflicted for quite some time, those who don't understand the internet pretend that there's no conflict at all. That's a problem. Part of the reason why the SOPA/PIPA efforts worked was because people inherently recognized an attack on their free speech rights. Keeping the focus on such rights is the only way efforts to be proactive and move forward will work.



• Don't be confined by what's been done or how others do things. While I'm not against the idea of these sorts of "internet super PACs," something about them feels very... old school. Similarly, I've heard talk of efforts to "hire a lobbyist" for "the internet." Perhaps these things need to be done, but I worry if those become the sole focus of the strategy, because it seems to be playing into the thinking of "the way things are done" in DC today. It's way too easy to be co-opted into the system if you play by their rules.
  
  The reason that the protests worked (so far) was because we didn't "play by the rules." We came together incredibly organically (and chaotically at times -- and sometimes didn't come together at all, as different people and groups just did different things). If this effort is going to turn into something more powerful going forward, it needs to keep some of that same spirit and thinking. It can't just squeeze itself into the way things are done in DC today, or it will become "just another super PAC" or "just another lobbyist." That's not useful or productive.
  
  I'd really like to see a lot more out-of-the-box thinking, about how we can actually use the tools of the internet to make a difference, rather than looking at how we can use the tools of DC to join the crowd.

As Lauren Weinstein points out in an excellent, monitory blog post entitled "Battling Internet Censorship: The Long War", that would be a big mistake:

you might be tempted to assume that the battle is over, the war is won, and that -- as Maxwell Smart used to say -- "Once again the forces of niceness and goodness have triumphed over the forces of evil and rottenness."

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, the forces arrayed in favor of Internet censorship are not only powerful and well funded, but are in this game for the very long haul indeed. A day of demonstrations to them, as annoying as they may be to these censorship proponents in the very short run, are in the final analysis more like a single human lifetime compared against the centuries.

One of the key problems is that few within the Internet world know much about how "DC" – the inner circle of US policy-making – really works. One person who does is Christine Paluch, as she explains in this post seconding Weinstein's warning about "The Long War":

Here in DC the long war is not some analogy, it is a way of life. This is a town of strategists and researchers who often lay intellectual groundwork for legislation that gets put into place long after they have moved on to another issue. I should know this, I was one of the researchers, and I worked on a few major issues involving regulatory policy, specifically labor and employment, environmental issues, consumer product safety, and healthcare. It is not very often that somebody sees their work used in laying the groundwork for historic legislation, but the work of me and my fellow researchers was used in a few pieces of historic legislation. It was a part of the long game, one that took over 5 years to completely play out, and I was only there for part of it. I was already left the campaign by the time the legislation went through congress.