Online Advocacy: Same As It Ever Was?

Being a communications consultancy that bridges the two worlds of Silicon Valley and Washington, DC, we're often asked by media about the impact of blogs on the public policy advocacy process.  Most of the questions come in reference to the perceived power of blogs in shaping the net neutrality debate.

We don't think there's a right answer here.  The Web, the numbers who use it, and how it's used is just evolving too fast.  But, we won't duck the question and will continue our history kick...

Despite the fascination with bloggers, bloggers blogging about net neutrality and bloggers blogging about themselves blogging about net neutrality, there has been online activism almost as long as there has been a public Web.

The net neutrality fight has many parallels to anti-Communications Decency Act battle that raged beginning in 1995.  Online activists were emboldened by free-speech issues and teamed with established companies to fight the legislation.  The activists lost the fight in Congress and with President Clinton who signed the bill, but generated enough momentum and support that they rallied considerable resources to their side to win in the Supreme Court, which struck down the law. 

The activists...

• Got sites like Yahoo! to go black for a day (Black Thursday)

• Organized online petitions that got more than 100,000 signatures

• Drove direct constituent communications to members of Congress

If we can learn from recent history, the CDA battle taught us that the Web can quickly bring people together to marshal forces for a common cause, but that if the driving issue goes away, so do many of the participants.  You need a pressing, immediate battle to really rally the troops.  As the Net Neutrality battle is likely to slip into a new Congress and become more of a nuanced battle, it will be interesting to see if the "net roots" maintains its attention.

Just like online activism and public affairs efforts of the 1990s, the Web 2.0 version still represents only a single battleground in the overall war to pass or defeat legislation.

And, there are some who have even used the blogosphere's perceived support for NN against cause. 

Danny Glover, who tracks the intersection between Congress and blogs, noted six weeks ago:

The fight to ensure "network neutrality" for content on the high-speed Internet has generated plenty of attention in the blogosphere, but the lawmakers who will decide the matter do not appear to be fazed by the blog swarm.

When the House debated the issue last week -- and voted soundly against strengthening net neutrality language in its telecommunications bill -- only one lawmaker even mentioned blogs, according to a search of the debate in the Congressional Record, and it was a rather dismissive reference, too.

"[T]he advocates for this amendment claim this amendment is about consumers, the little guy," said Charles Gonzalez, D-Texas. "Countless bloggers have written all members of Congress in fear if this amendment does not pass, they will no longer be free to express their opinions on the Internet and have their voices heard.

"Let me tell you as directly as I can to all the bloggers out there, to all of [the] e-mailers out there, to all the households out there, to the average American: This [net neutrality] amendment is not about you. It is not about the consumer."

This, of course, isn't too different than using a street protest against the cause of the demonstrators.  In this case, how very mainstream.

Still, the Internet won't have "made it" in Washington until a Web-enabled communications tool supplants the power of the phone or the fax machine in impact on the average Congressional office.

Aside: 
We think the most exciting new communications tool to come out of the net neutrality debates has been the effective use of video to simply tell a complex story much more effectively than a thousand-word blog screed.  We've shown plenty of the videos here, but you can also simply search "net neutrality" on YouTube and be amazed by the creative uses of video and animation to position the issue.  Advovacy professionals looking for an edge will be learning video editing applications like Final Cut very soon.