How Europe can save the Internet

When the French MEP Kader Arif stepped down last week from scrutinizing the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, declaring that he "would not participate in this charade", it was the culmination of eight years of political lobbying, back-room deals and undemocratic conniving that now threatens to undermine the entire global Internet economy.

Two weeks ago, I stood in Civic Center Plaza in San Francisco with a group of Internet entrepreneurs, Venture Capitalists and journalists. Among them were Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist; Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr; Ron Conway, the legendary Silicon Valley VC; and nineties pop-rapper MC Hammer, now a startup entrepreneur.

It was the first political protest from the Silicon Valley tech community in 25 years, Conway reflected, and he couldn't remember what the previous one was for. It's a notoriously apolitical community, and though powerful, we were a small group; a homeless man with a bicycle and a can of cheap beer audibly heckled the speakers throughout.

We were there to protest two American laws: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which was worming its way through Congress, and the PROTECT-IP Act (already an acronym, popularly shortened to PIPA), which was doing the same through the Senate. Both were ostensibly designed to protect intellectual property owners in the new economy. However, in the process, the digital baby was thrown out with the bathwater. The provisions undermined judicial due process by adopting a shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach with infringing websites, and placed onerous restrictions on service providers by discarding their traditional "safe harbour" protections. Perhaps most grievously, the legislation undermined the technological bedrock of the Internet by requiring proactive filtering to be placed at the Domain Name System level (which translates human readable URLs, like imperica.com, into machine-readable physical server addresses, like 94.136.40.103).

Collectively, by making service providers responsible for the content posted by their users, these restrictions would have made it impossible to run a publishing platform like Reddit, YouTube, WordPress.com, Flickr or Facebook. Traditional media outlets would once again be our primary destinations for content – which many people argued was the whole point.

The Silicon Valley community responded by taking their sites offline on January 18th, hosting petitions and asking their users to call their representatives – often by clicking a single button on the website itself. Google alone collected over seven million signatures in 24 hours, and by the time the day was over, it was clear that the legislation was dead in the water. Their co-sponsors withdrew, and the bills themselves were eventually shelved. The CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, Chris Dodd, called the backlash "unprecedented", before suggesting on national television that politicians who wanted to receive his organization's money had better look after its interests.

Which brings us back to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and Kader Arif. If you're reading from outside the United States, don't sit too comfortably: SOPA and PIPA were two aspects of a much bigger piece of legislation that is on the verge of being set in stone.

ACTA and its cousin, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, contain many of the same provisions as SOPA and PIPA. They require signing nations to bring their intellectual property laws in line with each other, which includes restrictive clauses that go well beyond the digital realm and limit, for example, the production of generic drugs. However, they also infringe on the right to free expression and eliminate judicial process in copyright infringement cases, just as US law does, and encourage service providers to collect extensive logs about their users' Internet habits in order to protect themselves from legal penalties. Indeed, the onus appears to be on establishing proactive surveillance of individual users in order to protect against crimes that they might commit, and removing the presumption of innocence once a claim has been made. Despite declaring an intention to prevent piracy, the agreements once again represent a significant infringement of civil liberties and undermine the principles by which the Internet works. The agreements' intentions appear good at first glance – who doesn't want to protect the rights of artists? – but actually represent an irreversible erosion of personal freedoms.

The political lobbying that underlies these agreements comes from traditional media companies. Last year, a letter co-signed by the MPAA suggested that the European Union should not seek a legal review of ACTA by the European Court of Justice. "While we welcome the prerogatives in IP and trade matters conferred to the European Parliament under the new Treaty", they wrote, "we are concerned that the procedure of seeking an Opinion from the ECJ will substantially delay the final adoption and implementation of ACTA and weaken the position of the EU vis-à-vis its international trading partners as a leader in proposing and supporting effective enforcement of intellectual property rights globally." In other words, there would be economic penalties for performing legal due diligence.

Despite Arif's spirited resignation, the European Union signed the agreements this month, joining the United States, Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea. Five EU nations have yet to ratify them: Cyprus, Estonia, Germany, the Netherlands and Slovakia. If this fails to happen, the entire agreement will need to be redrawn. It is now up to the European tech community to follow in the footsteps of its friends across the Atlantic and act to protect not just its industry, but the rights of individuals in the countries where it does business, and the future of the global digital economy.

Here in Silicon Valley, we're hoping you'll do the right thing.

Ben Werdmuller von Elgg is CTO at latakoo. He is @benwerd on Twitter.