Mozilla Slams CISPA, Breaking Silicon Valley's Silence On Cybersecurity Bill
While the Internet has been bristling with anger over the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, the Internet industry has been either silent or quietly supportive of the controversial bill. With one exception.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two days ago, GigaOM's Why is Silicon Valley silent on CISPA? put a name on an odd dynamic: mass public anger at the cybersecurity bill while the companies that built the consumer internet stayed quiet or quietly supportive. The contrast with SOPA was stark — in December 2011, Valley execs had blasted that bill in an open letter, helping kill it.
Mozilla's statement ends that silence with one voice breaking ranks, and the story's wide same-day pickup across CNET, The Verge, Raw Story, and WebProNews shows how much attention the first corporate dissent attracts.
First-order effects
- Mozilla becomes the lone major internet company on record against CISPA, giving the online protest movement a named corporate backer it previously lacked.
- Every other large Valley firm now faces direct pressure to explain its own position, since 'silent or quietly supportive' is no longer an uncontroversial default.
Second-order effects
- Rivals' users and advocacy groups will benchmark their employers' or providers' silence against Mozilla's stance, making public neutrality costlier for consumer-facing platforms.
- Industry lobbying groups that support information-sharing now have to reconcile member-company brands built on user trust with positions taken in members' names.
Third-order effects
- If the SOPA-versus-CISPA contrast holds, cybersecurity bills will keep exposing a split between companies' public privacy branding and their policy-shop behavior — a gap regulators and activists can exploit in every future information-sharing fight.
The trend: Cybersecurity legislation is forcing internet companies to choose between public privacy positioning and quiet accommodation of government information-sharing powers.