There are a lot of legitimately bad guys out on the Internet that are selling stolen goods, and they should be stopped. So legislation was drafted to restrict the travel of you and me - Customers of the Internet - to make sure that we couldn't drive on the roads that lead to the places that sell the stolen goods. Customers of the Internet sensed this inconvenience, so they revolted.
Here’s the issue:
When you attempt to fix a problem, particularly a problem that lies in the "back office," that fix must be invisible to the customer. If the customer might feel the fix in some negative way, you'll be hurting the customer experience. In attempt to fix one problem, you'll be creating a new one - resistance from a customer base, or worse, defection. That's essentially why the anti-piracy legislation has suddenly hit a roadblock.
There's a legitimate problem with piracy on the Internet, but the bill, as written, was attempting to stop the sale of pirated content by preventing the "customer" of the Internet from accessing sites that are involved with the selling of the illegal content. The real problem has been that the people have been selling material that they have no legal right to sell. The problem was in the "back office" - sellers had illegally acquired inventory.
The legislation should act first or foremost if not exclusively on the seller. Instead, as designed, the bill was attacking the customer and their beloved experience of going anywhere they chose to go on the Internet.
Wikipedia, Google and a host of other organizations were able to clearly see the issue; the issue of an indirect, rather than a direct root-cause solution an indirect solultion that potentially had a big negative impact on the billions of "customers" of the Internet. They rallied the customer base, and the voice of the customers removed the momentum of the bills.
There's a big lesson here for any business: If you're trying to solve a problem, particularly a "back office" problem, be sure that the solution you're proposing will be invisible to the customer; the customer should not feel the effects, unless those effects are positive.
If the solution will impact their experience in any negative way, expect a backlash, either through vocal objection, or worse, the dreaded defection objection.
