> The Italian government has just announced (16.30 CET, 05 October) that it will modify the proposed law to include only large online news websites and that all others (including blogs and Wikipedia entries) will be excluded. This is widely seen as a victory for the Wikipedia campaign.
Seems to me like exactly the outcome the initiators of the law desired. Make an obviously absurd first draft, "tone it down", get it passed and everybody's praising them for their moderation. Meanwhile, it's exactly the "large online news websites" that were targeted.
An interesting angle of this, which Wales highlighted, is that it was a community decision made entirely by the Italian Wikipedia's editors. Afaik, that makes Wikipedia the only top website where the userbase controls the website in some sort of effective, practical manner, so that it's even possible to temporarily take it down as a protest. With most other sites, it would've had to be a top-down decision of the site owner.
I suppose the next closest might be convincing people to mass-blank their tumblrs, but that has a certain collective-action-coordination problem.
Seems to me like exactly the outcome the initiators of the law desired. Make an obviously absurd first draft, "tone it down", get it passed and everybody's praising them for their moderation. Meanwhile, it's exactly the "large online news websites" that were targeted.