Reddit, GoDaddy, SOPA and Consumer Sovereignty

Or as we might recast the phrase consumer sovereignty, you’d better do what your customers want or you’re not going to have any customers.

The background is certainly well known to you all: SOPA is the latest piece of copyright and intellectual property law nonsense to come down the pike. As such laws so often are it’s been largely crafted by the rent seekers and would work against the interests of consumers.

So what happens next? There’s no election coming up in which we can cast a democratic vote against the bill. Even if there were such an election a law like this is not going to have an election turn on it. So the political system doesn’t really have what is needed to be able to successfully oppose it.

However, as classical liberals (otherwise known as right wing ideologues) like me continually try to point out is that in our interactions with companies, corporates or suppliers, we all have a vote all the time. We can simply withdraw our custom from those who displease us. Might be because they’ve got the girls and boys toys separated (outrageous sexism according to those who have just managed to get Hamley’s (the UK equivalent of Schwartz’s in New York) to stop the practice), could be because we don’t like the way an oil company is disposing of an old rig (Greenpeace organised a boycott of Shell over the disposal of Brent Spar: a very bad decision as it happened but an effective boycott all the same) or it could be because we’re not going to buy domains, or have them maintained, by someone willing to support such grubbily rent seeking laws.

And there has been such a consumer boycott gaining speed:

SOPA Supporters Learning (Slowly) That Pissing Off Reddit Is A Bad Idea

from the don’t-mess-with-reddit dept

As they point out:

Enemy number one on the list appears to be GoDaddy, with Redditor’s organizing a day (Dec. 29th) for GoDaddy customers to transfer their domains away from the registrar. We’ve discussed GoDaddy’s bizarre support for the law in the past — including the fact that, under the original definitions of SOPA, GoDaddy itself qualified as a “rogue site” since it recommended people buy domains violating the trademarks of lots of big companies. Of course, it’s also notable that GoDaddy recently hired a top lawyer… whose previous job was in “IP enforcement” for the federal government.

Well, guess what? It has worked:

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (Dec. 23, 2011) – Go Daddy is no longer supporting SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” currently working its way through U.S. Congress.

“Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation – but we can clearly do better,” Warren Adelman, Go Daddy’s newly appointed CEO, said. “It’s very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it.”

Who needs politicians when we’ve each got a vote with how we spend our money?

Although, being a classical liberal (read “horrible right wing ideologue” if you wish) I do have to go on to point out that there’s another side to all of this as well.

We can see that the consumer dollar can stop companies from doing what we don’t want companies to do. The flip side of this is that if we all quite happily spend our consumer dollars with a company then we’re not actually unhappy with what the company does. Remember this the next time someone tells you how appalling it is that WalMart closes down Mom and Pop stores just by the very fact that they open an outlet. If we the consumers preferred the Mom and Pop stores then we would spend our dollars there and the WalMart would be empty of customers. That isn’t generally, what happens (although it did happen to WalMart in Germany, and WalMart closed down its operation in that country), it’s the Mom and Pop stores that close down and the WalMart that near collapses under the throngs vying to give the store money.

We actually prefer the WalMart experience as is shown by the manner that we go and shop there. Which is why those who oppose the store chain so often try to use the law, zoning, politicians, to stop it. Because they know that a consumer boycott won’t, for the consumers by their very actions show that they’re perfectly happy with the idea of cheap goods rather than more expensive ones.

Via: Forbes