And here’s where EFF showed its true colors. The group published a string of blog posts and communiqués that attacked Figueroa and her bill, painting her staff as ignorant and out of their depth. Leading the publicity charge was Wentworth, who, as it turned out, would jump ship the following year for a “strategic communications” position at Google. She called the proposed legislation “poorly conceived” and “anti-Gmail” (apparently already a self-evident epithet in EFF circles). She also trotted out an influential roster of EFF experts who argued that regulating Google wouldn’t remedy privacy issues online. What was really needed, these tech savants insisted, was a renewed initiative to strengthen and pass laws that restricted the government from spying on us. In other words, EFF had no problem with corporate surveillance: companies like Google were our friends and protectors. The government—that was the bad hombre here. Focus on it.

[...]

In the public sphere, meanwhile, EFF’s vision won out. Concerns about private surveillance were pushed out of the spotlight, crowded out by utopian proclamations about how companies like Google and Big Data would change the world for the better. Privacy would come to mean “privacy from government surveillance.” And corporations? Corporate intentions were assumed to be good—or, at worst, neutral. Corporations like Google didn’t spy; they “collected data”—they “personalized.”

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.

The defeat of SOPA was naturally a time of great celebration for EFF. The group’s campaign was successful, effectively short-circuiting any possible discussions about using copyright and anti-piracy enforcement to make sure people aren’t getting exploited. From 2012 forward, the bid to license and preserve online copyright has been monstrously, and misleadingly, framed as struggle against totalitarianism, conflating Silicon Valley’s right to pirate content at will with liberty and freedom for the masses. As such, the SOPA battle was just one more successful application of EFF’s rhetorical public relations strategy: frame any attempt to regulate Silicon Valley power with totalitarianism, all while conflating the interests of regular internet dwellers with the plutocrats who own the internet.