SOPA and PIPA were backed by a broad coalition of business groups and interests, including the recording industry. They were was also backed by just about every major labor group—the Screen Actors Guild; Songwriters Guild of America; AFL-CIO; American Federation of Musicians; American Federation of Television and Radio Artists; Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers’ International Union; Communication Workers of America; and Directors Guild of America, among others.

SOPA and PIPA were not perfect, but the defense of culture workers online had to start somewhere. There had to be a way of building an internet ecosystem that didn’t just enrich media monopolies and multimillionaire celebrities and cheat the creative working class out of their labor. There had to be a way of paying the people who created the bulk of our culture: musicians, photographers, filmmakers, authors. But as it turned out, these topics were taboo. They were not up for discussion. Because Silicon Valley, despite whatever lip service it pays to the idea of individual creativity and “thinking different,” wanted to do no such thing.

Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Mozilla, Reddit, PayPal, Twitter, and scores of smaller tech companies went into battle mode to oppose SOPA and PIPA. They framed the legislative dispute as a fight between freedom and totalitarianism and launched a frenzied public relations and lobbying campaign to kill the laws. The overheated rhetoric of the anti-SOPA tech moguls resembled nothing so much as the take-no-prisoners agitprop of the National Rifle Association—right down to the claim that, even if a regulatory curb on the criminal abuse of tech platforms were to pass, it would prove useless in execution and enforcement, just as Wayne LaPierre and Oliver North insist that curbs on untrammeled gun ownership would do precisely nothing to curb determined criminals from flouting such regulations.