Who really was behind the SOPA protests?

Some critics have blamed Silicon Valley tech firms for the massive online protests last month against two controversial copyright bills. Other groups have trumpeted the grassroots nature of the protests. The reason it’s important to explain what happened is to show that it’s possible to again organize large-scale online protests in the US.

“What we’re seeing here is this integration of the organizations with [Washington] expertise, and these organizations that are very plugged into these user-driven social networks,” said Harold Feld, legal director of Public Knowledge, one of several groups that worked behind the scenes on the protest. “Multiply all of that across a community that is used to figuring out ways in which people can use these technologies for social interaction very quickly.” Fight for the Future, a fledgling group started in late 2011, plans to build on the SOPA protest model to draw together a network of websites to form an “Internet defense league” to contact Congress about future bills that threaten Web freedoms, said Tiffiniy Cheng, cofounder of Fight for the Future and OpenCongress.org, a congressional watchdog site.