Open Internet Movement

The open internet movement is the recurring mobilization of internet users, online communities and technology companies against legislation and regulation they treat as threats to an open network. It is not an organization and has no membership; it appears when a specific bill or rule does.

January 2012

The best-documented episode is the campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, which culminated in a coordinated website blackout on January 18, 2012.

Two days earlier the Electronic Frontier Foundation set out the objections: that the bills created liability for hosting information about circumventing blocks; that they let companies block sites voluntarily on a “good faith” standard with no judicial review; that they gave copyright holders a right of action against entire foreign sites rather than specific infringing material; and that they expanded the Attorney General’s power to delist sites from search engines and cut off their payment processing.

The bills were withdrawn. This page records the objections and the outcome; it does not assert that the campaign caused the withdrawal, which is a causal claim about congressional decision-making that nothing cited here establishes.

2017-18

The equivalent campaign against the repeal of the 2015 net neutrality framework did not succeed. The Federal Communications Commission’s Restoring Internet Freedom order was published in the Federal Register at 83 FR 7852 on February 22, 2018 and took effect.

A page describing this movement through 2012 alone would give a misleading picture of what mass online mobilization reliably achieves.

The comment counts were fake — on both sides

The New York Attorney General’s 2021 investigation into that FCC docket found it comprehensively corrupted.

The broadband industry spent $8.2 million generating roughly nine million comments and letters opposing net neutrality, and the lead generators it hired largely fabricated the responses, impersonating real people; more than half a million letters went to Congress the same way. On the other side, more than 9.3 million comments using fictitious identities were submitted in support of net neutrality, over 7.7 million of them by a single nineteen-year-old running automated software.

This is the most important thing on the page, because mass comment volume is the metric this movement’s campaigns are usually judged by, and in the best-documented case the volume was manufactured in both directions.

What was removed

The previous version carried a chronology with several precise unsourced figures — that “over 115,000 websites participated in some form of protest” in 2012, that congressional offices received “millions” of contacts, and that the Save the Internet coalition’s campaigns “generated millions of public comments” to the FCC. Given the finding above, unsourced comment and contact volumes are not merely uncited but actively misleading, and all have been removed.

The founded field, which read 2006, has been removed along with the chronology that supplied it.

Collection note

This page overlaps substantially with digital-rights-coalition, anti-censorship-advocacy and free-speech-absolutism. The overlap is recorded as a merge candidate in reports/citations/movements.md.