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What the first web blackout looked like, 17 years ago

297 points| sethbannon | 14 years ago |old.cdt.org | reply

42 comments

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[+] delinka|14 years ago|reply
This was to protest President Clinton's signing of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. The indecency provisions of the act were struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional the following year. Additional legal challenges took ten more years to come to fruition. More detail welcome in the comments on HN.
[+] Tobu|14 years ago|reply
The CDA was later struck down by the supreme court, thanks to a challenge by the ACLU: http://epic.org/free_speech/cda/
[+] r00fus|14 years ago|reply
Keep in mind that was before the Roberts Supreme Court, who had just recently declared Corporate Money == Speech (via Citizens United case).

If SOPA passes, I hold out very little hope that this Supreme Court will do much of anything to ameliorate it .

[+] joeyh|14 years ago|reply
Ouch, I feel old now. Here's the .signature I used at the time, featuring an encoded bit of anti-CDA, presumably illegal under CDA profanity.

    #!/usr/bin/perl -pl-                                     ,,ep) ayf >|)nj,,
    $_=reverse lc$_;s@"@''@g;y/[]{A-U}<>()a-y1-9,!.?`'/][} #         Joey Hess
    {><)(eq)paj6y!fk7wuodbjsfn^mxhl2Eh59L86`i'%,/;s@k@>|@g #  [email protected]
(Flips text upside down.. we didn't have unicode then..)
[+] teeray|14 years ago|reply
Yeah... who else thought, "Wow, 17 years ago... that was in the 80s" before realizing that there was no web to black out then?

I feel like an old, old, man.

[+] tristan_louis|14 years ago|reply
As one of the participants, I remember this well. It was the first time there was a major action from pretty much all large web sites on the internet.

iWorld (later known as internet.com) became part of the blackout and, at the time, we were one of the most trafficked sites so it was a big deal to convince the company that owned us (the company was Mecklermedia and was publicly traded) that this was a good move and that it made sense.

The blackout the web day was not the end but the beginning of the fight over the CDA. It eventually took some work but the challenge made it to the Supreme Court (the case was called ACLU vs. Reno) and it helped expand first amendment speech protection to the internet.

[+] fkn|14 years ago|reply
I was too young at the time to be aware of this blackout, but I am grateful to the ones that protested this bill. The internet would not have been the same if people are scared to express their ideas/opinions/arts.

I wonder about the world we would be in if the bill had passed as it was presented.

[+] gojomo|14 years ago|reply
It did pass and was signed into law.

Through a combination of people ignoring it, and the Supreme Court eventually knocking the worst part down, it wound up 'mostly harmless'.

Not every battle has to be won via a vote in the legislature.

[+] troll24601|14 years ago|reply
The bill did pass. The ACLU and the Supreme Court got rid of it.
[+] bryanh|14 years ago|reply
What I find most interesting is the line about knowing when to switch to black: "You can also just watch CNN; they'll announce the signing of the bill."

When was the last time you saw CNN covering bill signings?

[+] acknickulous|14 years ago|reply
Oh my god--I remember this. It's biggest legacy was that a lot of people realized they really liked black backgrounds on their web pages and left the that way. A new era in front end design was born. (But they didn't call it front end back then)
[+] jordanb|14 years ago|reply
One takeaway should be just how absurd the communications decency act seems given the modern reality of the internet.

This was a law written by people profoundly out of touch with the way the world was moving.

I think it should have lessons for our current struggle against the current COPA and PIPA bills, which are campaigned for, drafted, and promoted by people who have a similar disconnect with the future of information.

[+] kipsfi|14 years ago|reply
The best part of this was the concept of banding together as group of "thousands" in this blackout. As of 2007 (the latest numbers I could easily find), Wikipedia as a whole has > 2500 views per second. Of course, the English Wikipedia is the only one being blacked out as far as I know, but I expect it also is a large portion of that 2500 views/second.

And that's just Wikipedia! Seems to me that a few more people will be affected this time around.

[+] the_paul|14 years ago|reply
Er, 2012 - 1996 = 16, not 17?

I feel old already. I don't want to get charged for the extra year.

[+] danyork|14 years ago|reply
Wow... what a blast from the past! I remember that time period well when we were all concerned about the CDA (and also the proposed Clipper Chip mandatory encryption). Thanks for posting this link to the past...
[+] adestefan|14 years ago|reply
The Clipper Chip fiasco was mandatory key escrow.
[+] AdamFernandez|14 years ago|reply
It will be interesting to see the difference, in terms of impact, between a blackout of the very nascent web of 1996 and of the very powerful web of 2012.
[+] rometest|14 years ago|reply
May be this is a dumb question, cant the universities participate in blackout?
[+] nowarninglabel|14 years ago|reply
For most public universities, I'm pretty sure it would be against the law to willingly take down services. Of course, this doesn't mean students and professors couldn't participate by taking down their sites or protesting.
[+] scelerat|14 years ago|reply
Tangential, but I miss well-formatted monospace 80-column emails.
[+] sethbannon|14 years ago|reply
This was the first web blackout on record, taking place 17 years ago to protest the Communications Decency Act.
[+] noinput|14 years ago|reply
great flashback, all it's missing is a few <blink>'s
[+] jQueryIsAwesome|14 years ago|reply
Or a big <marquee>; can you believe that it still works in Google Chrome? (but still just as smooth)