Don’t Break the Internet: Constitutional Narratives and the Making of Internet Policy

An emerging literature on the history of digital grassroots, or “netroots,” activism repeatedly returns to a foundational story of U.S. resistance to the Stop Online Piracy Act or SOPA (Lee 2013; Benkler et al. 2015; Tufekci 2017). What did it mean, as scholars have vividly described, for the Internet itself to “get angry” and defend itself? While this SOPA story has become a symbol of successful online activism, I argue it also revealed the tensions within traditional policymaking infrastructures struggling to make sense of the digital. This presentation looks at the history of the SOPA debate among key policymakers in the Obama Administration to understand how imaginaries of networked resistance reformulated approaches to governing. Based on digital archives and oral histories from more than two dozen participants, the history of SOPA reveals the strategies President Obama’s advisors deployed to “see” and “hear” the American people and to navigate their own role within the Administration. I argue that policymakers within the President’s administration leveraged three long-standing narrative traditions to address the bill. First, they drew upon the utopian histories of the Internet as a site of idealized democratic expression in ways that invoked a “Jeffersonian” vision of distributed power (Turner 2006; Post 2009). Second, they saw networked computers as means to know and to control the population of the United States (Edwards 1996). Third, they presented technology as inherently fragile, and in need of continuous maintenance and care (Russell and Vinsell 2016). The interplay of these three discursive strategies helped bind together a community that would drive Presidential Internet policy agenda.