Internet Defense League: Assemble.

Last night, Betabeat checked ourselves in with a nebbishy man holding an iPad, rode the elevator up to "PH" with another nebbishy man (a copy of The Leaderless Revolution tucked under his arm) and arrived upstairs at the Internet Defense League's New York launch party, just as the OpenPlans roofdeck was beginning to fill up.

It was one of those rooftops that aren't quite at the top of the world--in fact, we could see the tealights of another party happening several stories up, right next door--but rather one of those that leave you hovering smack in the middle of the skyline, feeling pleasantly loomed-over.

"It really looks like Gotham," observed one attendee--though a cleaned-up version, surely. We can't imagine Batman existing in a city with such a carefully landscaped roofdeck. The edges were covered in those wildflowerish grasses that grace the High Line, giving the whole place the feel of a rendering displayed in the lobby of a particularly hip school of architecture. Not entirely surprising, given OpenPlans' mission is to "help cities work better."

It quickly became clear that about half the crowd was there not to fight for Internet freedom, but rather for OpenPlans' happy hour. We struck up a conversation with a soft-spoken gentleman holding a large bowl of popcorn, who explained that he worked with a nonprofit that deals with "public spaces," and that he'd come from another party on a neighboring deck. (We hope he rappelled, Batman-style.)

But the occasional snatch of conversation made it clear we were among the techies: "I was programming in BASIC when I was 10," we overheard at one point, followed shortly thereafter by, "I'm pretty sure Facebook is culture." We heard at least one enthusiastic young man (college-aged, we figured) describing himself as "crazy" for the New York startup scene.

We started talking to a Laptop Magazine writer named Daniel Berg, there on behalf of his own personal blog (and hoping for a chance to meet Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian). He admitted that the name and the concept were "a little cheesy," but, given the difficulty of staying on top of every new political development, it provides a valuable rallying point.

"I can focus on my day-to-day job, and I can focus on everything else, and know that I am tuned in that if there is something important going on, I'll immediately be aware, my website will immediately be a part of the movement, and I can just leave it in the hands of people that I trust," he said.

We wouldn't have time for following the SOPA opera if we had Mr. Berg's schedule, either: He recently competed in the AngelHack competition, building a kind of Rotten Tomatoes for hotel reviews, called the Stayover. (They made it to the finals in San Francisco, but didn't quite nab the pot of funding at the end of the rainbow.)

At this point, the party was well and truly warmed up, with the roof deck getting crowded and the drinks growing scarce. Another man wandered up and told us that he'd looked up and recognized someone at the snack table, only to realize--after starting to speak--that it was in fact Jeff Jarvis, with whom he was not personally acquainted. We looked up to see Mr. Ohanian making his way through the crowd, with general manager Erik Marin barreling after him. Circulating once more, we fell into conversation with a developer (slight and fair-haired) and community manager (impressively bearded) from Turntable.fm.

If only this reporter were able to follow the finer points of the programming language Ruby, she might've learned something.

About that time came the event we'd all been waiting for (well, those of us who were there for the Internet Defense League, rather than the OpenPlans' get-together): The unveiling of the cat signal. Several sites have already adopted the digital version, a few lines of code that'll switch on if the IDL detects anything it deems a new SOPA-style threat to the open web. But it's hard to match a giant, crazy-eyed cat projected onto the side of a Manhattan building for sheer spectacle.

Mr. Ohanian, making a few remarks.

After leaning over the edge for a good look, we practically bumped into Mr. Martin--who does, as another attendee pointed out, look the the tiniest bit like Tintin's sidekick, Haddock.

"This is fun, and, like, the cat signal thing is fun. But people are out here because they want to be a part of something," he told us. "It's cool to see people actually, like, get out and support this." Betabeat remarked on how nice IRL events are, to which Mr. Martin replied, "Yeah, which is weird, cause we're about defending the Internet."

He returned to floating about the party, while groups continued to form and reform around Mr. Ohanian. Finally giving up on catching him alone, Betabeat crept up to eavesdrop. Here's what we learned: Mr. Ohanian is, for lack of a better term, a complete cat lady. An earnest young woman had gotten him onto the subject of Karma (get it?), his beloved black cat. "She's a diva," he informed us, adding that "she's waiting for me at home." Whipping out his phone to show everyone a picture, he confessed she used to be the background, but "it got weird."

Someone pulled him back to the topic of the IDL, which he explained simply as designed to deal with "anything that threatens to fuck up the Internet." That's a pretty broad mandate.

Then the aforementioned startup-crazed young man asked Mr. Ohanian for tips about how to "make it." Mr. Ohanian immediately began preaching the gospel of programming. Developers, he explained, are like Jay-Z. Everyone wants a minute of his time, or his advice, or his presence, and Jay-Z can't do it all. Learn enough Ruby to get a quick and dirty prototype up and running, and, "No offense, but if I'm a developer, I'll have more respect for you."

All the while, a tall, pony-tailed acolyte nodded his agreement. "Listen to this man," he chimed in.

Making one last round of the room, we bumped into Nick Grossman, the event's organizer, who told us he's affiliated with Union Square Ventures and the MIT Media Lab, but working on a new advocacy organization, "focused on innovation and the open web." Even he admitted the event's sweep was wide: "The purpose of all of these events, as far as I understand it, is to get people excited about the web and standing up for the web," he said.

He had a positive spin on the mixed crowd: "Everybody for both events I think shares a certain ethos about openness and creativity and the potential of things like the web and open systems and collaboration, et cetera, et cetera," he said.

By this time, the party had long since peaked and was winding down to a few stragglers. Mr. Ohanian, however, was still surrounded.

We hope they didn't keep him from Karma too late.

Despite their signs, these people are not with Backpage. (Photo: Melissa Gira Grant)

Backpage.com, owned by the Village Voice, is one of the more controversial web enterprises: according to some reports, it hosts 70 percent of the web's sex ads. On Wednesday night, there were two protests outside the Voice's offices in Cooper Square. One was led by radical feminists and evangelical Christians who compare Backpage to a pimp, hoping to shut it down the way Craigslist's "adult services section" was shut down. The other protest was led by Backpage users: escorts, dommes, and rent boys, who say shutting down the site will run them out of business or onto the streets.

Police tell members of the Sex Workers Outreach Project where they can protest. (Photo: Melissa Gira Grant)

The New York chapter of the Sex Workers Outreach Project faced off with a coalition of anti-prostitution feminists, 33 evangelical Christian youth, their faith leaders, and a girls' theatre troupe. While the SWOP folks passed out flyers explaining the controversy to people rolling out of work early on the hottest and longest day of the year, the anti-Backpagers walked a picket line on the street just outside the doors of 36 Cooper, inside which no sex trafficking takes place, but where the Village Voice is housed.

There was also a drum circle.

It wouldn't be a protest without a drum circle. (Photo: Melissa Gira Grant)

Out with the SWOP protesters was Vivian, a sex worker who's been blogging her experiences using Backpage. "Because I could work for myself and control my working conditions, I was able to screen clients for the first time," she wrote. That meant being able to avoid potentially violent customers approaching her online.

About twenty feet to her left--at least spatially, if not at all politically--the anti-Backpagers carried mini pink umbrellas from Duane Reade as they marched. Picket lines, a not entirely extinct form of protest, are most often performed by workers outside their own workplace, in solidarity with the workers inside. Not so this time. Picketers carried signs likening the Village Voice to pimps.

The marchers prefaced their "Prostitution has got to go!" chant with the unlikely "Hey, hey! Ho, ho!" a few times until a 20-something Caucasian man in a pressed shirt, who held a sheet listing the chants of the day, chimed over them with "No more selling women here, Village Voice, change your career."

(Photo: Melissa Gira Grant)

Despite the words they were saying, several of the anti-Backpagers told me that they were not there in opposition to prostitution, or to adult women who work online as escorts. Some of them had also used Backpage. One was Jonathan Walton, the director of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship's New York City Urban Project, who brought out 33 members to the protest. As 20 women circled around us bearing placards demanding the abolition of Backpage, Mr. Walton told me he uses the website to create "prayer maps."

"I use these sites to figure out where the girls are for sale. We can figure out what the men are saying they want on Backpage, and then we can find the brothels by cross-referencing that with their blogs," he explained, referring to the blogs that some customers of sex workers have begun to publish. "They're all online. It's so easy."

Once a brothel (or an apartment believed to be one) has been mapped, Mr. Walton leads his youth ministry there for prayer. "We go to these places and pray. God loves the traffickers as much as he loves the exploited victim."

(Photo: Melissa Gira Grant)

I noticed that the majority of anti-Backpagers on the picket were wearing yellow armbands bearing a cross with a hand on one side and a foot on the other. I asked four different people wearing them what they meant, but no one would tell me. "Have you met Jonathan?" a man who looked much older and a little less pulled together than the cleaned-up kids who were picketing. "He could tell you." He handed me a bottle of water imprinted with a heart draped in chains and the URL priceoflifenyc.org. (The website advertises a 1.2M initiative targeting 10 New York college campuses with social media and evangelism – "Stop Kony" with a sex trafficking twist.)

Our conversation was interrupted by a series of speakers. A handler identified the one with a mop of brown pretty boy curls, who called Internet pornography "a sea monster, a leviathan, that will eat our women and children alive," as "Aaron Cohen, slave hunter." Mr. Cohen traded his rock and roll lifestyle ("he used to be known as Perry Farrell's best friend and spiritual collaborator," a LA Weekly profile notes – the LA Weekly, owned by Backpage parent company Village Voice Media!) for raiding brothels in Southeast Asia.

Following Mr. Cohen came Norma Ramos, a 50-ish woman in a khaki-colored dress and wide-brimmed hat that recalled the kind of get-up I imagined Nicholas Kristof might favor while rescuing "sex slaves."  Ms. Ramos, one of the protest's lead organizers, brought up New York City Council Member Brad Lander, the co-author of a city resolution demanding the closure of Backpage. Mr. Lander recalled the contentious hearing at which Village Voice's general counsel, Liz McDougall, attempted to explain Backpage's best practices for identifying ads that might include illegal content, including references to underage persons. "She had the audacity," he told the assembled crowd, now swelled to 50, "to say that Backpage knew better, than the mayors, than all the Attorneys General."

Norma Ramos, holding a sign. (Photo: Melissa Gira Grant)

One of those Attorneys General, Rob McKenna of Washington state, is the architect of policy that threatens not just Backpage, but free speech online. In an amendment to Washington State Senate Bill 6251, Mr. McKenna aimed to make Backpage illegal by criminalizing any individual or company who "knowingly publishes, disseminates, or displays, or causes directly or indirectly, to be published, disseminated, or displayed, any advertisement for a commercial sex act, which is to take place in the state of Washington and that includes the depiction of a minor."

This is where the issue transcends debates about sex; like two high-profile anti-piracy bills that were halted earlier this year, a law like this threatens to drastically change the way the Internet works. The word "indirectly" in the bill recalls the issue with the unpopular Stop Online Piracy Act–its breadth potentially guts the core protections in the Communications Decency Act, the law that prevents websites from being held liable for material posted by their users. Such a sweeping change, digital rights advocates fear, could force the entire web into the purgatory of comment-moderation.

(Photo: Melissa Gira Grant)

New York City Council member Melissa Mark-Viverito, who co-sponsored the resolution to demand Backpage shut down, shrugged when I asked her what we could expect if Backpage did close. Would it be a repeat of the the Craigslist "adult services" closure, which drove so many sex ads to Backpage in the first place?

She passed me back to Mr. Lander, the resolution's other co-sponsor. "Look, sex trafficking won't end tomorrow if Backpage is shut down," he said. "But the internet, it's pretty good at expanding business. It makes it easier to buy things you might otherwise be ashamed of buying."

Mr. Lander assured me he had consulted with SWOP. "I can't imagine why they wouldn't want to set up their own website, and have their own people advertise on it."

I circled back to Vivian, who confirmed Mr. Lander had one meeting with her, but hadn't addressed SWOP's concerns. "I told him there were serious problems with the bill, that we needed to be brought into the process as the real experts on Backpage. But he said, 'this is what I believe, and this is how I'll vote.'"

Mr. Martin (Photo: Reddit)

The top-scoring link of all time on the social news website Reddit is a post that users were never meant to see at all. It is titled “test post please ignore,” but almost 27,000 Redditors found it so amusing that they voted it up.

That is testament to the website’s impassioned community—and their brand of dry, often geeky humor (the site’s logo is an alien, after all). But Reddit’s user base, which a recent PBS documentary pegged as 72 percent male, has wide-ranging interests. Other top posts include a link to a news item about the elderly volunteering to clean up nuclear waste in Japan following the 2011 tsunami, and a Q&A session with the famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Reddit is one of the country’s most highly trafficked websites, but its general manager, Erik Martin, keeps a remarkably low profile. Most Redditors know the 33-year-old Mr. Martin solely by his username: HueyPriest.

“Part of that’s just me, but part of it is like, we never wanted Reddit to be about the people who work there,” Mr. Martin told Betabeat on the second floor of a San Francisco café that was swiftly inching toward sweltering in the late April heat. Dressed in a plaid button-down and jeans, with dark circles forming beneath his eyes, he looked every bit the startup ingenue. “We don’t want it to be this cult of personality thing that I think some sites get turned into.”

Owned by Advance Publications, Reddit is not a publisher but a platform that allows users to share links, stories and multimedia. Often referred to as the “front page of the Internet,” it is notorious for inside jokes. While cartoon rage comics, for instance, may have originated on the ever-more-offensive 4chan message boards, they certainly reached their apex on Reddit (just read the recent New York Times article for confirmation on that). Users also can create their own “subreddits”—or sections—based on any topic of their choosing, and volunteers with no formal association to Reddit moderate them. Democratization is inherently woven into the site’s functionality: users vote posts up or down at their pleasure: The more votes a post gets, the better chance it has of making it to the “front page,” where the most readers will see it.

And an eye-popping number of users do see it: the site averages 2.5 billion pageviews a month. With user statistics like that, and an especially loyal following, detractors have derided it as a “hive mind,” but that doesn’t fully account for the complexity and generosity of the community: A few months ago, the site hosted a poignant question-and-answer session with a survivor of Norway’s Utøya massacre, for example, and there are countless threads that help collect donations for the community’s sick or needy members.

“‘Hive mind’ is often used pejoratively, and I definitely understand what people are referring to, but I think the idea of a hive mind works pretty well for bees,” offered Mr. Martin, when asked about Reddit’s “upvote now-assess later” tendencies. For bees, he explained, a hive mind means that it takes a democratic consensus to make an important decision, like where to construct a new hive.

“[The hive mind] is a very fast, sort of reactionary thing, and that has bad results sometimes, results where people are not as skeptical as maybe they should be. You need to make sure enough bees are going to double-check the new location. You need a bunch of bees going like, ‘You are right, that is a pretty great new home, it has a tire swing.’”

A little history: In 2005, the site’s young co-founders, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, were accepted by the startup incubator Y Combinator for its first-ever round. A year later, in a push to expand its online brand, Condé Nast acquired Reddit for between $10 million and $20 million. At the time, Reddit averaged just 70,000 unique daily visitors.

After the sale, Condé worked feverishly to fold Reddit into its stable of well-established print brands, like Vogue and Wired. “We thought of Reddit, [technology blog] Ars Technica and Wired as what Condé Nast deemed the ‘innovation group,’” said Jena Donlin, who runs business operations for Reddit and still works out of the Condé Nast office in Times Square.

Mr. Martin, who had majored in American Studies at Tulane and worked in the documentary film industry, served as the site’s community manager at the time, a role that he said entailed “answering user questions, dealing with spam and finding cool things in the community to promote.”

By all accounts, Mr. Martin also played a significant role in ushering in a successful transition from an independently run website to a division of a major publishing conglomerate. What made the job even harder was that Reddit’s approach to publishing exemplified the democratizing influence of the web, which at that very moment was violently destabilizing the whole we-speak-you-listen model that Condé Nast, with its pantheon of all-powerful editors, had long since mastered.

As Reddit’s user base continued to grow following the acquisition, the tension between the democratized user-generated site and its ancient publishing parent became more pronounced. Reddit does not offer traditional advertising, so its primary stream of revenue came in the form of Reddit Gold, a paid premium membership subscription, as well as what Mr. Martin called “self-serve ads for mom-and-pop shops” and carefully selected marketing partnerships.

The site, which boasts a barebones user interface that harkens back to the halcyon days of ’90s Usenet groups, has always shunned traditional advertising, a stance that even a cash-starved, ad-hungry Condé Nast couldn’t change. Monetizing Reddit is something Condé Nast “has still not been able to figure out,” Mr. Ohanian said in a 2010 episode of Big Think, adding, “Reddit has a fantastic audience ... How do we advertise to them in a way that isn’t screwing them as a user and at the same time providing enough value to an advertiser to want to do it?”

(Photo: Flickr.com/teuobk)

But in August 2010, an advertising controversy erupted between the stodgy parent company and its willful child. The activist group “Just Say Now” wanted to host self-serve ads on Reddit in support of the proposed California marijuana legalization law Prop 19, but Condé Nast refused. The Reddit team responded by agreeing to host Just Say Now’s ads on their site for free, a move that was still technically within the bounds of the parent company’s rules, but made a strong point.

Reddit’s traffic continued to explode, and in early 2011, the site was getting upward of two billion pageviews a month. Condé Nast wasn’t equipped to handle the technological and cultural challenges that came with that kind of traffic. And the tensions between the little-website-that-could and its old-school parent company were starting to take their toll. “In the spring of 2011, we had one programmer and two system administrators and me,” Mr. Martin explained. “It was kind of a rough time, and I was like, ‘If Reddit needs me to move out to San Francisco, I’ll do it. I’ll do whatever Reddit needs. I can’t let this fail.’”

Mr. Martin agreed to move to San Francisco at the behest of Condé, and took on the general manager role. He began to grow the team, hiring a handful of programmers to administer the site. Finally, in September 2011, the company spun Reddit out of the Condé Nast family into its own standalone subsidiary, while still retaining ownership.

“We don’t want to get in users’ way,” Ms. Donlin explained. “We want to serve what the community is already doing. Condé Nast understood that, and it’s why we’re independent. They understood that we needed to be able to do that in order to grow. And they realized in the current structure of Condé Nast, it wasn’t as easy to [grow] because there wasn’t a precedent that was set. We’re more bottom up whereas Condé is more top down.”

Mr. Martin agreed. “The process didn’t allow for [what Reddit needed], that was the main tension. [Condé’s] process is set up for sales cycles that take longer and there’s more sort of time for that kind of vetting and decision-making. But most of the Condé brands have more people on the sales side than we have total employees.”

Reddit hired its first-ever CEO in March 2012, an ex-Pay Pal and Facebook engineer named Yishan Wong. Now, Reddit is a subsidiary of Advance, separate from Condé, and reports to a board populated with executives from both Condé and Advance, along with Mr. Ohanian. “We’ve been working with Advance Publications to complete [R]eddit’s spinoff,” Mr. Wong wrote in a triumphant blog post on Reddit, “[including] a revamped capital structure that will allow [R]eddit to manage its own finances and operations.”

“The way that the site works,” said Kevin Morris, a staff writer at the Daily Dot, in a recent PBS segment about Reddit, “[is that] it tends to attract people who want to know the truth.” In January 2012, the Reddit community’s large-scale vocalization of their opposition to SOPA and PIPA, coupled with support from equally passionate communities on Tumblr and Wikipedia, eventually persuaded lawmakers to table the legislation. Reddit, an online community that had only been around for six years, had successfully helped to defeat the American government.

IN APRIL 2012, MUCH to his surprise, Mr. Martin was named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people. For the event, Mr. Martin donned a tuxedo for only the second time ever—the first being a friend’s wedding—and completed the outfit with a shiny pair of Reddit cuff links.

“It was very surreal,” he confided a few weeks after the event. “I’ve never been to something like that. I got to meet Ralph Nader, who is adorable. He asked about Reddit and I explained it to him, but I don’t know if I was successful.”

Mr. Martin is unfailingly humble about his contributions to Reddit. “Any credit I would get,” he said, “would be for not fucking it up.”

“At Reddit, he doesn’t say, ‘Hey, check me out,’” explained Nils Olsen, an old friend of Mr. Martin’s. “He says, ‘Hey, check you out.”

“He can be very humble,” agreed Ms. Donlin. “That humbleness has also been what’s made him so successful.”

Mr. Martin will be moving back to New York in July to focus on the business and media aspects of the site and to run the New York office.

As for that TIME 100 award, it doesn’t appear to have gone to his head.

“Ralph Nader went to give me his business card and he said, ‘Well, I kind of ran out of my current cards, but I grabbed this stack of cards from the 1970s.’ All it had was a P.O. box. It didn’t have a phone number, so he scribbled it on the back,” he said.

“I was like aaahhhh, I am framing this! It was amazing.”

That sounded like an upvote.

A version of this story appeared in the New York Observer the week of Wednesday, June 13th.

Rep. Issa discussing CISPA, which he supports, at the Personal Democracy Forum.

One of Andrew Rasiej's favorite jokes is that legislators don't know the difference between a server and a waiter. Mr. Rasiej, chairman of the NY Tech Meetup and founder of Personal Democracy Forum, a summit on tech and politics, moderated on stage at NYU's Skirball Center. Mr. Rasiej faced off with netizens Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA). "Why is it that so many members of Congress don't seem to understand the Internet?" he asked.

"We don't use our children enough as advisors," Sen. Wyden said, in a joke that fell flat. "There is a generational divide on this issue."

Rep. Issa had a more thoughtful answer. "The path to Congress or elected office usually doesn't lead through tech activities," he said. "More than half of Senators are lawyers, slightly less than half the House are lawyers. There are more doctors than people who have ever started their own business."

He agreed there is a generational divide, with Congresspeople relying on IT staff to understand the Internet for them. "A lot of times, people have just simply gotten into the habit of not wanting to learn how things work because they're doing
other things... then they make these terrible jokes that show they really don't know how it works."

The uprising around SOPA and PIPA seems destined to hover around industry conferences indefinitely. Cheezburger Network chief Ben Huh said the now-legendary online protest that stopped the twin anti-piracy bills, SOPA and PIPA, would be the dominant topic at the Internet comedy gathering ROFLCon.

The pair positioned themselves as Internet-friendly, with Sen. Wyden even name-dropping TweetDeck. Rep. Issa thanked the audience and 15 million digital protestors "for what you did on January 18" to stop the bills.

Sen. Wyden proposed a "digital bill of rights," to repair the relationship between Congrees and the American web industry.  "It sounds like you're starting what amounts to a digital Constitutional convention," he told Mr. Rasiej. The bill of rights would enumerate broad rights such as "freedom," "open Internet" and the right of digital citizens to "share."

"The more I learn about the 'net, frankly, the less I know," he admitted.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post described Mr. Rasiej as a lobbyist. While he is a politically active techie, coordinating the Personal Democracy Forum as well as the large anti-SOPA protest in New York, he has never been employed as a lobbyist. Betabeat regrets the error.

John Lund (Getty Images)

It's starting to feel like someone declared war on Internet piracy earlier this year while we were busy reading Reddit. But while the battle over Internet laws continues, the discussion sparked by anti-piracy legislation earlier this year seems to have disappeared.

The fight now centers on ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement that the European Union signed in January. This still-murky law, most of which was crafted quietly behind closed doors, has potential to threaten those who make the Internet their livelihood. So where are the Internet masses who came out in full force, blocking out websites and amassing in person in protest of the twin anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA?

As it turns out, the battle may not be ours. The latest roadblocks to ACTA in Europe likely means most of the anti-ACTA heavy lifting won't happen on this side of the Atlantic, said Andrew Rasiej, an entrepreneur and the chairman of the New York Tech Meetup who was instrumental in organizing protests in New York City against SOPA and PIPA.

A suspension of the law by the European Court of Justice has put the yet-to-be ratified and controversial multi-national agreement on hold until it can be determined whether or not it violates fundamental EU rights.

If ACTA stalls in Europe, it doesn't make sense to protest it here, Mr. Rasiej said in an email. "The battle over ACTA, as a threat to open architecture of the Internet is now being waged in other places, most notably Europe, where parliamentary approval is required for implementation," he said.

But that doesn't mean the Internet bloc can happily go back to its business. If anything, SOPA and PIPA should have been a wake-up call: nerds, the law applies to you too.

Internet activists should be concerned with more than just the challenges of combating piracy while maintaining free expression, or learning how to secure the ever changing digital infrastructure the world has come to rely upon, Mr. Rasiej said. Elected officials still don't seem to “get it” when it comes to making laws that impact technology. While Congress now knows (we hope) that the Internet is not a series of tubes, legislators still have a long way to go. "Politicians don’t know the difference between a server and a waiter," Mr. Rasiej said. "Imagine a future where our senators are explaining ACTA to us, not us explaining ACTA to them."

Mr. Wilson, right.

At the Paley Center for Media yesterday, New York tech's paterfamilias Fred Wilson offered something largely absent from recent anti-SOPA debates: a plan for an alternative. Better yet, he wasn't just preaching to the choir. Rather, the Union Square Ventures managing partner broke on through to the other side: media execs.

Last month, he seemed frustrated, tweeting out "#screwcable" when a feud between MSG and Time Warner Cable forced Mr. Wilson to consume pirated content if he wanted to see the (pre-Linsanity) Knicks. But during yesterday's talk, Mr. Wilson seemed more convinced of the universality of the condition.

"Making everybody a criminal is not the way to do this," he told the crowd in an impassioned speech, appearing visibly moved by the wrong-headedness of the government's approach:

"We gotta fix the system so that the content is available legally on the internet in a way that it is available for people to consume it. As convenient as turning on your TV and watching HBO, that's how convenient it has to be. The content industry has not made this content convenient to access on the internet and as a result everybody, and I mean everybody, is a pirate. Okay so in the world where everybody is breaking the law, you gotta look at the law. Is it the right law?"

Rather, as CNET reports, Mr. Wilson proposes establishing an independent group to develop "a black and white list." He listed Hulu, Netflix, Rdio, Spotify, and Rhapsody under "the good guys." (One could also add Boxee and Turntable.fm, both USV-backed companies, to that list.)

Then the Web sites that wish to participate would serve a pop-up notice when users tried to visit blacklisted sites.

"We're not blocking people from the site," Wilson continued. "The interstitial says, 'You're going to a site that's on our blacklist. We believe this site contains almost entirely pirated content and by the way you can get that content legally on these whitelisted sites.'"

Wilson would like to see Google, Facebook and even Mozilla participate and if they did he would want them to report "to the world" how many people they're sending to "MegaUpload and The Pirate Bay and the BitTorrent sites...Using technology, we train our youth to know that they're doing something bad and how they could do something that's good."

It's an intriguing proposition that seems to borrow elements from the quantified self. "You visited X number of pirated content sites today, give us back your good Internet Samaritan badge." But even Mr. Wilson seemed skeptical about the viability of the plan, admitting, "Google should do this. They won't but they should." CNET was likewise dubious about whether studios and labels will bite. (The content providers favorite part, noted CNET, seemed to be when Mr. Wilson said pirate sites should be shut down.) In the wake of the outcry over SOPA and PIPA however, content providers might be willing to compromise to get some good will from the tech community.

Mr. Wilson's invitation to the lion's den seems like a step forward. Hopefully, the media moguls stopped fretting over perceived lost revenues long enough to pay attention to this part:

"Our children have been taught to steal," Wilson said, "and they have been taught not just by the MegaUploads, BitTorrent (sites) and Pirate Bays but have been taught by the content industry because the content industry has not let them have what they want legally, inexpensively, and conveniently."

Fred Wilson: 'Everybody Is a Pirate, So Fix the... by tvnportal

Inside jokes.

Fresh of the heels of feeling its own might in the fight against SOPA and PIPA, a civic-minded Redditor who goes by the handle "ajpos" has decided to start a section 527 political action committee.

It's called Test Pac, it has its own Tax ID number and it purports to represent "the special interest group that represents the views of Reddit's users," which we guess means boobs, the free flow of information, weed, and cats. In that order.

However, as Reddit's general manager Erik Martin informed us, it's not Reddit's first "unofficial" PAC. Under the subreddit /r/rpac, you can also find threads about Hive PAC (another recent organization inspired by the SOPA Opera), as well as The OSDF, or Open Source Democracy, an older initiative.

Betabeat Gchatted with Mr. Martin to find out whether Reddit was having its political coming of age and whether Redditors are on board.

Do you think this PAC is a positive step for Reddit in terms of exercising its political power?

Absolutely and as far as I know there are now 3 "unofficial" Reddit PACs.

How would you characterize the community's response? Obviously there's a lot of nitty-gritty details to work out.

The response is, as with all things on the internet, chaotic. But it's chaotic good.

In his post about Test PAC, ajpos addresses concerns about diluting other Reddit efforts. Do you think that's something to be worried about, or is any representation good representation when your interests aren't being voiced?

You see things like all the unofficial PACs, people active in /r/runforit, new campaigns against bills in the EU. I think trying to reign everyone in a concentrated way would be exactly the wrong approach. The advantage of the Internet community is our distributed and fragmented approach. A ton of ideas get presented, good ones rise to the top.

Is Reddit having its political coming of age moment? Or is the public just now taking note?

A little of both.

Are there Redditors that don't want to see their community take the spotlight? Or has the threat of SOPA/PIPA sort of obliterated that sentiment?

Sure. Reddit is a community of communities in many ways, so the appetite for attention and activism varies, but I think everyone now sees the power that individuals and communities can have.

Dumb question, but the PAC is also referred to  "Test PAC, Please Ignore." Is the "please ignore" a reference to something?

Heh. It's sort of a Reddit inside joke. One of the top Reddit posts of all time was "Test post, please ignore."

Ha! Why was it so popular?

Because it said "ignore." Fitting I think. You can't tell the Internet what to do.

Real talk.

So, I think anyone who is trying to tell the Internet what to do now that "it has all this power"  is not only mistaken, but counter productive.

I was wondering about that, like I'm sure there are those who object to being monitored by the Federal Election Commission?

The best thing we as people who are working behind the scenes (or groundskeepers as we often refer to ourselves) can do is to make sure there are places where, as much as possible, the best ideas can rise to the top, and the most people can participate, and encourage more things like Test PAC or people running for local office because they see /r/runforit or politicians coming onto IAMA or their local subreddits etc.

Right.

But what we don't need is some Internet version of MPAA. Maybe the companies do, but not the communities. There's a difference.

You don't want to switch from the disenfranchised to the monolith.

Thor forbid.

Anti-piracy rhetoric holds that online piracy is a devastating force on the U.S. economy, responsible for the theft of between $200 billion and $250 billion per year and the loss of 750,000 good American jobs. "These numbers seem truly dire: a $250 billion per year loss would be almost $800 for every man, woman, and child in America. And 750,000 jobs – that’s twice the number of those employed in the entire motion picture industry in 2010," write the economists over at Freakonomics.

But those numbers are wrong, the authors say, citing a breakdown by the Cato Institute's Julian Sanchez. 

In 2010, the Government Accountability Office released a report noting that these figures “cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology,” which is polite government-speak for “these figures were made up out of thin air.”

More recently, the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI) placed the number at $58 billion; but that reporter is methodologically flawed, Mr. Sanchez and tech journalist Tim Lee have deconstructed, and is guilty of double-counting with results that "swell the estimate of piracy losses considerably."

So, how much is piracy hurting us? "At this point, we simply don’t know," say the Freakonomists. "It’s clear that, at least in some cases, piracy substitutes for a legitimate transaction... In other cases, the person pirating the movie or song would never have bought it. This is especially true if the consumer lives in a relatively poor country, like China, and is simply unable to afford to pay for the films and music he downloads. Do we count this latter category of downloads as “lost sales”? Not if we’re honest."

Then there's the trouble of calculating the impact lost sales have on jobs. Money saved on a DVD is money that consumer is likely to spend elsewhere, possibly creating jobs in the skateboard, cereal or comic book industries.

Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, brought sympathy cards which he planned to hand-deliver to the senators, mourning the death of the internet.

Scott Heiferman, Meetup CEO, held up a sign after his speech that read, “Can we go back to work now?” in a cunning reference to the jobs the industry creates in New York, and perhaps the cold weather too.

Jessica Lawrence, managing director of NY Tech Meetup, felt for the kids who had to do their homework without the help of Wikipedia, after the site shutdown for the day to show support for the protests, “that tells you how much the internet affects the whole of society,” she said.

Andrew McLaughlin, former Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer and current Executive EP of Tumblr, and John Perry Barlow, founder of Electric Frontier Foundation and ex Grateful Dead lyricist, spoke to the Betabeat after the rally.

“It would be unthinkable if it passed,” said Mr. Barlow. Responding to whether he thought Hollywood lobbyists are actively flexing their muscles in this bill, he said “I mean Lamar Smith, who is kind of a small time Texas Representative, got over $60,000 in the last election from Hollywood.”

“I take the backers of the bill at their word,” Mr. McLaughlin said. “They are concerned about a legitimate problem: counterfeiting overseas and copyright infringement overseas, but [the bill] is not simply a function of Hollywood lobbying, it’s who [Congress is] used to hearing from.”

He added, “They are used to hearing from Hollywood, now the internet community is mobilizing to say ‘we’re here, we matter and we’ve got legitimate problems with how they are going about pursuing these well intentioned goals.’”

Mr. McLaughlin thinks the movie and recording industries need to rethink their own plans. “It’s not so much that Hollywood and the recording industry are dying, it’s that some of the companies are having trouble adjusting to the new ways of making money,” he said.

So can the “well-intentioned” goal of policing and stopping piracy actually be enforced successfully and without quelling a vibrant startup industry? Mr. McLaughlin thinks so. “Domestic privacy is not a problem because we have the DMCA here, who take copyright seriously and pursue it.

What examples can he give when such clampdowns were fruitful? we asked.

“Well, we’ve done that in the case of commercial child pornography, illegal online gambling and terrorist networks. In all those different areas we’ve proven that we can utilize techniques to find the bad guys, track them down, break into their email and in most cases arrest them. Those same techniques can be applied here.”