A fixture in the music industry since the mid-1990s, Bronfman led WMG during a period of profound tumult, navigating a rough transition from CD to the digital download, and grappling with a generation of younger consumers who don’t always want pay for digital music.

Onstage at D: Dive Into Media this afternoon, Bronfman reflected on the evolution of the music industry, Apple, and the fate of EMI, which is currently being pursued by Universal Music.

“It strikes me as hubris that Universal will buy EMI,” Bronfman told Peter Kafka of AllThingsD. “What it will do is create a super-major that will have far too much power. … I think when Universal goes up over 40 percent market share, I don’t see how reasonable regulators can countenance. It will impact not just labels, but artists and cultural diversity. … Warner is going to fight this tooth and nail, and I hope others will join us.”

As with today’s Neil Young session, the perceived obsolescence of the recording industry was a topic of conversation and, as you might imagine, Bronfman feels labels remain a necessity.

“Commercial success still hasn’t come to an artist that isn’t signed to a record label, he said. “There are very few artists that can succeed without the help of a record label. The role of the record label is still required, it’s still necessary.”

And not just for musicians. Consumers need labels, as well.

“I really do think consumers are busy, and trying to sort through millions and millions of artists to find the ones that they might like just requires far too much work. That’s where the labels come in.”

A few other remarks worth noting …

On mobile:
Mobile is coming. It’s still not really there. It’s on the iPhone because Apple has a content strategy, but it’s not really there on other devices. … I think the mobile platform is a massive opportunity for music. … Think about it. The iPod made music mobile, but today, how many devices do you need to walk around with? You want it on just one. And inevitably that’s going to be the phone.

On Google Music:
Google Music is an oxymoron.

On unbundling:
Any time you can give consumers more of what they want, it’s a good thing. Unbundling the album is a good thing. In the case of music — because it is content that you can slice into songs — doing that is of huge benefit to consumers.

On Apple and iTunes:
Apple from day one believed in music and content. That was the good news. The bad news is that they decided all songs where created equal, and I fought Steve on that. Ultimately, Apple got the better part of that deal. Ultimately, I wish we’d gotten more pricing flexibility.

On Spotify:
We see Spotify as incrementally positive. It’s not slowing down music sales or downloads. We would all love to make more money from Spotify, but Spotify needs to make money, too. But artists should know that it is a real and growing revenue stream.

Some initial reactions to the proposal, which was pre-announced at the DLD conference in Munich and then published on Wednesday, were harshly critical.

Writer Jeff Jarvis was armed and ready to rebut European Commissioner Viviane Reding’s opening address on “the right to be forgotten” at DLD, having criticized her data protection stance in his new book “Public Parts.”

“I very much fear Reding’s ‘right to be forgotten’ and its impact [on] free speech and the right to know,” Jarvis wrote.

A European Microsoft executive was also quick with the skepticism. “We have been pushing for harmonisation of privacy laws for several years, but we are concerned that these proposals may be too prescriptive,” Ron Zink, who is Microsoft Europe’s chief operating officer and associate general counsel, told the Financial Times.

Analysts and industry groups called Reding’s ideas “draconian,” “prescriptive,” “onerous” and expensive.

But now that Reding has formally proposed her legislation, Web companies seemed more measured in their response. Though they didn’t endorse the bill, they seemed willing to work with it. Of course, they’d prefer to avoid walking into fines of up to two percent of their revenue.

In statements emailed to AllThingsD, Google asked for a “simple” solution, while Facebook continued to talk up its positive impact on European jobs.

Said Google: “We support simplifying privacy rules in Europe to both protect consumers online and stimulate economic growth. It is possible to have simple rules that do both. We look forward to debating the proposals over the coming months.”

A Google executive at a conference in Brussels further questioned how, exactly, third-party sites could be responsible for deleting all instances of data online after it had been posted.

Here’s Facebook’s extended statement:

The revision of Europe’s Data Protection framework is an important opportunity to develop regulation that both protects privacy and supports the creation and growth of modern services over the global Internet. We welcome the move towards more harmonization of Data Protection laws in the EU which will help create legal certainty and confidence for companies to operate.

We agree with the recent statements made by Commissioner Reding that the new regulation should foster growth and job creation. Services like Facebook already contribute significantly to economic activity in the EU and can be a major driver of growth and new jobs in the future.

We will continue to work closely with politicians and regulators in the EU in order to share our experience and expertise and contribute to achieving sound privacy regulation and a thriving digital sector.

Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik, whose company offers what could be seen as “the right to be forgotten” as a paid service to customers, said he didn’t necessarily support Reding’s proposal but he disapproved of industry hysteria around regulation of the Internet.

“I think that light regulation is often a stimulant to innovation,” Fertik said.

“Right now the absence of law supports the incumbents of the Internet, which are advertising businesses,” he added. “But what’s bad for Facebook today may be good for a thousand companies tomorrow. The biggest promise of the right to be forgotten is it’s going to enhance the trust of the Internet, which could be a boon to e-commerce.”

As for some other major Web companies in the business of identity and user-generated content, Twitter declined to comment on EU data protection policy, while Tumblr — which had been especially active in fighting SOPA — did not respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, U.S. lawmakers on Thursday expressed concerns about Google’s new unified privacy policy.

Also, it helps if they can’t steal it.

That’s the takeaway from a new survey from the IFPI, the music industry’s global trade group. It says global digital music sales grew 8 percent last year; that’s the first time that growth rate has increased since 2004, when the IFPI started tracking the statistic.

A good chunk of that increase may have come from subscription music services like Spotify and Deezer. The IFPI says subscription services have 13 million paying users, up from eight million last year.* There are also smaller increases in sales at more conventional outlets like Apple and Amazon, which generate much more revenue for the industry overall.

And while digital music sales still make up a minority of the music industry’s revenue worldwide, they are increasingly important: They now account for 32 percent of sales, up from 29 percent last year. (In the U.S., digital just edged physical last year, for the first time.)

All of which sounds fairly straightforward. But the IFPI is a trade group; it wants to hammer at one of its key points, which is that piracy is a big problem for the industry, which has seen sales cut in half since the Napster era. It figures more than a quarter of all Web users “access unauthorized services on a monthly basis.”

So, if piracy is a problem, why are sales increasing? In part, the trade group argues, because of anti-piracy legislation and industry moves.

The report highlights France’s “three strikes” rule, which allows the government to fine pirates and take away their Internet access. It cites a study arguing that French iTunes sales have increased more than 20 percent because of the policy, and the suggestion is clear: This would be a good idea worldwide.

The IFPI, which has singled out Google for criticism in the past, once again complains that the search engine makes it too easy to find illegal stuff. It also clearly went to the printer before the weekend, because its report refers to SOPA/PIPA as works in progress that are “set to be debated further in early 2012.”

*That number sounds several million high to me, but perhaps my rough estimate is missing a couple of big players.

Poor Chris Dodd — he just got the top media lobbying job in Washington, D.C., at the very moment that the strong-arming-pols, scare-the-children, Jack Valenti era in media lobbying is now decidedly over.

It’s obviously a very confusing time for big media these days, on a lot of fronts. But any of the consummate insider moves once used by the legendarily pugnacious Valenti (pictured here onstage at our first D: All Things Digital conference in 2003) had a hard time this past week, as Internet players went very public in protesting two Congressional bills aimed at combating piracy online.

Not that Dodd didn’t try to cope.

The former Senator — who is now the chief lobbyist for the once much more powerful Motion Picture Association of America — gave a can’t-we-all-get-along interview to the New York Times on Thursday, in which he called for a meeting with techies to come to some acceptable compromise.

Wrote the Times:

“In an interview Thursday, Mr. Dodd said he would welcome a summit meeting between Internet companies and content companies, perhaps convened by the White House, that could lead to a compromise … ‘The perfect place to do it is a block away from here,’ said Mr. Dodd, who pointed from his office on I Street toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

But on Friday, after politicians quickly moved to delay both the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate’s PROTECT I.P. Act (PIPA) — after successful protests pointing out that the legislation could lead to censorship — Dodd went to the full Valenti again:

“We applaud those leaders in Washington who have chosen to stand with the millions of hard working Americans all across this nation whose livelihoods are threatened by foreign criminal websites designed to steal. As a consequence of failing to act, there will continue to be a safe haven for foreign thieves; American jobs will continue to be lost; and consumers will continue to be exposed to fraudulent and dangerous products peddled by foreign criminals.”

Foreign criminals! Foreign thieves! Is it just me, or does Dodd sounds like Cher, singing, “Gypsies, tramps and thieves”?

(Let’s be clear, that utterance could never top Valenti’s most infamous quote: “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.”)

To be fair, Dodd is hindered by strict restrictions on his lobbying Congress until next year. That said, this is not an old-timey, private Capitol Hill fight, but a modern-era, social-media-charged one.

And it’s pretty clear that the old scare tactics used by big media will no longer work as well, as consumers — as much as they like their movies — seem to love their Internet more.

Thus, what has happened is that — at least for now — the MPAA and media companies have lost and lost big, after the typically fractious Web powers decided to lock arms for once and cooperate with a creative, take-it-to-the-people approach of showing a disabled Internet.

Dramatic? Yes. Effective? Certainly. (That Facebook and Google agree on anything? Astonishing!)

Where it goes from here is unclear — the MPAA and its constituents could certainly rally and put forth their own protest. Ironically, the most effective way to do that is not via the airwaves or other former means of broadcast to the public, but on the Web.

Which is controlled by Dodd’s foes. (You see the problem here.)

The answer, in the end, might have to be the cooperation he first suggested.

As he told the Times:

“The companies, Mr. Dodd said, are ‘rethinking everything,’ not just about the bills, but about their relationship with an estranged Silicon Valley. That need for rapprochement, he said, ‘has come home in a way that no rhetoric of mine could express.’”

Much more to come, obvi.

The move came a day after Washington lawmakers were besieged by complaints about legislation designed to crack down on the online sharing of pirated copies of music, movies and other material, people familiar with the matter said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Several Republican senators, including Orrin Hatch of Utah, John Cornyn of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida, said Wednesday they couldn’t support the legislation in its current form.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook:

The internet is the most powerful tool we have for creating a more open and connected world. We can’t let poorly thought out laws get in the way of the internet’s development. Facebook opposes SOPA and PIPA, and we will continue to oppose any laws that will hurt the internet.

The world today needs political leaders who are pro-internet. We have been working with many of these folks for months on better alternatives to these current proposals. I encourage you to learn more about these issues and tell your congressmen that you want them to be pro-internet.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.):

The Internet has become an integral part of everyday life precisely because it has been an open-to-all land of opportunity where entrepreneurs, thinkers and innovators are free to try, fail and then try again. The Internet has changed the way we communicate with each other, the way we learn about the world and the way we conduct business. It has done this by eliminating the tollgates, middle men, and other barriers to entry that have so often predetermined winners and losers in the marketplace. It has created a world where ideas, products and creative expression have an opportunity regardless of who offers them or where they originate.

Protect IP (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) are a step towards a different kind of Internet. They are a step towards an Internet in which those with money and lawyers and access to power have a greater voice than those who don’t. They are a step towards an Internet in which online innovators need lawyers as much or more than they need good ideas. And they are a step towards a world in which Americans have less of a voice to argue for a free and open Internet around the world.

Legal Team, Red Hat Software:

In a single generation, the Internet has transformed our world to such an extent that it is easy to forget its miraculous properties and take it for granted. It’s worth reminding ourselves, though, that our future economic growth depends on our ability to use the Internet to share new ideas and technology. Measures that block the freedom and openness of the Internet also hinder innovation. That poses a threat to the future success of Red Hat and other innovative companies.

The sponsors of SOPA and PIPA claim that the bills are intended to thwart web piracy. Yet, the bills overreach, and could put a website out of business after a single complaint. Web sites would vanish, and have little recourse, if they were suspected of infringing copyrights or trademarks.

The good news is that there is growing opposition from many quarters to these bills. Just this past weekend, the White House expressed serious concerns, opposing legislation — like SOPA and PIPA — that “reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.

Lanham Napier, CEO, Rackspace:

In my last blog post on SOPA and PIPA, I explained why Rackspace — along with much of the Internet community — opposes these bills in their current form. They are well-intentioned, but would do more harm than good. Their enforcement provisions could be easily evaded, and they would undermine the security and stability of the Internet.

Since then, I and other Rackers have been working with key lawmakers to fix the bills so that they will (a) actually be effective in fighting online piracy, and (b) avoid disrupting the Internet or imposing unreasonable costs on Internet users and service providers.

We at Rackspace are on the front lines of the battle against copyright infringers and other online criminals. We employ dedicated teams that take enforcement actions under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as well as our own strict Acceptable Use Policy every day. We agree that better tools are needed for this fight but SOPA and PIPA do not fit the bill.

Gary Shapiro, President and CEO, Consumer Electronics Association:

“It is increasingly clear that bills causing collateral damage to innovation in the guise of fighting piracy are not politically viable. Now that unreasonable solutions to piracy have been shown not to work, it is time to explore reasonable ones. We urge policymakers to join CEA in support of the OPEN Act — a bicameral, bipartisan and narrowly targeted approach to fighting foreign “rogue websites.”

Paul Hortenstine, Motion Picture Association of America, which supports the bills:

The legislation targets criminals: foreign thieves who profit from pirated content and counterfeit goods. These foreign rogue websites are operating freely today while legitimate American businesses are opposing legislation that would block these criminal websites from the American market.

The Pirate Bay, a site that links visitors to pirated content and would arguably fit someone’s definition of “foreign rogue Web site”:

SOPA can’t do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we’ll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really.

To fix the “problem of piracy” one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they’re creating “culture” but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching movies and tv shows that make them think that they’re fat.

Ben Greenman, Contributor, The New Yorker:

Dear Spanish speakers, I was only joking when I said you think we’re all protesting soup. Geez: People are so touchy on blackout days

January 18, 2012 8:44 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@bengreenman

Ben Greenman

The attendees included veteran Washington policymakers and cyberdefense experts. But one person — an engineer named Dan Kaminsky who specializes in an arcane set of rules governing how people connect to the Internet — stood out.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, was among the most significant shifts. He said in a statement Wednesday afternoon that the bill is “simply not ready for prime time.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Many Internet companies and boldfaced names in tech have in recent weeks been vociferously opposing the passage of the bills, saying the provisions that would thwart piracy would also create an environment of censorship and unfairly target certain sites as being compliant in piracy. Supporters of the bills, meanwhile, say that the laws are necessary to clamp down on sites that circulate copyrighted content outside the U.S.

For those protesting the bills, some Web sites and developers have created options to help other Web users who want to black out all or portions of their sites.

SopaStrike.com is offering “blackout code” for Web users to copy and paste into the theme section of Web sites to protest SOPA/PIPA. The site says the code will only be available today.

The site encourages visitors to join the strike, sign up online and send letters to Congress. It also has a full list of confirmed participants in the strike.

CloudFlare is offering a “Stop Censorship” app that blacks out intermittent words on your site (you have to have a CloudFlare account to access the app). Visitors to your site will see the black bars only the first time they visit; after that, they’ll see a black “censored” label in the upper left corner of the site. CloudFlare also says it won’t block links, and is taking an SEO-friendly approach to blacking out words.

For users who don’t have a CloudFlare account, there’s a plugin available on GitHub, created by CloudFlare coder Mike Sofaer.

Some Webmasters might be concerned about the short-term impact of blacking out their sites, even if it is in solidarity with the national protest. WebMonkey points to a Google+ post from Google’s Pierre Far on how to black out sites the “right” way. He also notes, interestingly, that Google’s crawl team has configured Googlebot to crawl at a much lower rate for today only, so that the Google search results of Web sites involved in the strike are less likely to be affected today.

Around midnight last night, Google put up a blackout banner in front of its homepage logo; Wikipedia, BoingBoing and other sites also went dark. As AllThingsD’s Arik Hesseldahl writes, sites like Google could find themselves in legal hot water under SOPA and PIPA just for linking to pirated content in search results.

Still confused about what the SOPA protests are all about? AllThingsD has been covering the story, so here’s the latest, along with a growing list of participating Web sites. And the Guardian has a video explainer here.

On Saturday, the News Corp. CEO used his new Twitter account to rail against the search giant, call it a “piracy leader,” and gripe that it had too much influence in Washington, and the White House, in particular. (Here we need to remind you that News Corp. owns this Web site.) Business Insider has all four of his “Internet makes me angry” tweets (Update: He’s back at it! More below), including the one he deleted, but here are the two relevant ones:

So Obama has thrown in his lot withSilicon Valley paymasters who threaten allsoftware creators with piracy, plain thievery. -

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) January 14, 2012

Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts around them.No wonder pouring millions into lobbying. — Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) January 14, 2012

That amounts to an open invitation for Web pundits to sound off, which they were happy to accept. Techmeme is studiously collecting those responses, but the one I like best so far comes from Om Malik:

.@rupertmurdoch you weren’tcomplaining much when google was paying you big ad dollars for MySpace, that hosted some “pirate” stuff #SOPA

— Om Malik (@om) January 14, 2012

The obvious point to make here is that Murdoch’s venting (which his legal and PR handlers would love to quell, but can’t) was spurred by the White House statement which deflated the SOPA and PIPA antipiracy bills today. It’s also not the first time Murdoch has sounded off about Google.

In 2009, he went on a similar anti-Google crusade, though that one was more measured and planned, and involved many of his lieutenants. But do remember that in Rupe’s world, cursing loudly at someone doesn’t mean you can’t do business with them. A year after Murdoch was threatening to boycott Google, he cut a new deal with them. I’m sure it won’t be the last.

Speaking of Murdoch’s lieutenants: We’ll have his top one, chief operating office Chase Carey, at our D: Dive Into Media conference at the end of the month. And we’ll have a high-ranking rep from Google, too: YouTube CEO Salar Kamangar. Guess we’ll have to revisit this with both of them: Grab a front-row seat.

Update: Just like a lot of fellow Twitter users, Murdoch is having a hard time disengaging. Two more here:

Understand more than all allege!Google great company doing many exciting things. Only one complaint, and it’s important.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) January 15, 2012

Just been to google search for mission impossible. Wow, several sites offering free links.I rest my case.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) January 15, 2012

Today it became clear that SOPA, at least in its current form, will never get that far. Word came from the White House today that the administration, while sympathetic to the cause of curbing online piracy, will support neither the SOPA bill nor its companion bill — known as PIPA — in the Senate.

Responding to a petition, the White House announced in a blog post today that Obama will not “support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.”

Basically, what it comes down to is this: Piracy is bad, but approaches like SOPA are bad solutions that would potentially hurt the free-flowing, vibrant Internet we’ve all come to rely on for so many things. As the statement reads: “Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small.”

That aligns pretty closely with a statement that Secretary of State Hilary Clinton made in a recent speech in The Hague, in which she said that governments must fight the theft of intellectual property, “without compromising the global network, its dynamism or our principles.”

On top of that, some of the technical proposals in the bill — meant to remedy the piracy problem — go too far in tinkering, and might perhaps mess up the basic plumbing of the Internet itself. Doing so would probably create unforseen Internet security problems, the White House argues.

Any bill that does aim to clamp down on piracy should be “narrowly targeted,” and cover only “activity clearly prohibited under existing U.S. laws.” That’s also a pretty clear statement that the Administration sees SOPA, as currently written, to be vastly over-broad in its legislative intent.

Additionally, there are also reports that Eric Cantor — the Virginia Republican who everyone knows is the real power broker in the House of Representatives — says the SOPA bill won’t come to the House floor for a vote anytime soon, unless there are some significant changes to it.

Somehow, I find it encouraging that opposing SOPA — or at least calling for changes to it — was the issue on which Obama and Cantor, who can’t seem to agree on anything, found they had some room for common ground. Could this signify a badly needed thaw in bipartisan relations in Washington?

Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, said he would recommend that “more study” be given to a provision in the bill that would give the U.S. attorney general new authority to seek court orders compelling Internet service providers to block the sites’ domain names or Web addresses. A vote to bring the bill to the Senate floor for debate is scheduled for this month.

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Instead, I’m focusing on the ones that promise to bring me the TV I want to see, when I want to see it, without charging me a fortune. And without making me pay for stuff I don’t care about.

Try it yourself. See? Things get quiet in a hurry.

All that other stuff that everyone is talking about right now — new ways to get Web video onto your TV set, new ways to chat up your friends while you watch TV, etc. — is sort of interesting. Maybe it eventually turns into something really interesting.

But none of it solves the problem that regular people have with TV right now. Because they actually like TV quite a bit, and watch tons of it every week, and they’re okay paying for it, too, even if they say they’re not. They just want to pay less for the stuff they want.

Making that happen will require a lot more than using AirPlay to throw video from your iPad to your LCD, or making it easier to search the Web via a Google TV. It means fundamentally overhauling the TV business.

And while it can look like the TV business is loosening up dramatically — look at all those shows the networks are putting on the Web, for free! — it’s actually tightening up considerably — it’s getting harder and harder to watch that stuff, it turns out, without paying for cable, or going rogue.

Even the most interesting stuff I’ve heard about — selling TV “over the top,” via the Web — still contemplates buying bundles of channels from the programmers, which means that over-the-top TV will look just like cable TV. Just like satellite TV and fiber TV do.

“I think there’s not a lot wrong with the business models,” says Myspace owner Tim Vanderhook, who wants to launch his own over-the-top service this year. I’m not at all confident that he’s going to pull it off, but I’m sure the programmers are happy to have a chat. They love the idea of more buyers ponying up for their stuff.

One interesting variant you’re hearing more about right now involves keeping bundles intact, but buying less of them. If you don’t pay for ESPN, then you’re not going to get anything from Disney, including ABC Family and the Disney Channel. But if you can live with sports or kids stuff, you could save an awful lot — or put the money into other programming you do care about.

That’s not nearly as sexy as The End Of TV As We Know It, but it is doable. And I’ll definitely holler about that one, if and when we see it.

But here’s a picture of the Union Square Ventures partner watching the New York-Toronto game on his big screen, after all. He was able to get a feed of the game from a pirate aggregator called atdhe, he explained on Twitter. “Worked great for me. #screwcable”

The fact that it’s easy to get pirated TV, delivered over the Internet, isn’t new. It’s certainly not a revelation for Wilson, one of tech’s most prominent and successful venture capitalists, or his 199,000 Twitter followers.

Still, it’s always worth pointing out just how easy it has become. It’s particularly important when it comes to live sports, because that’s supposed to be the one thing that keeps everyone — or many people, at least — paying (a lot) for cable.

I’d be surprised if the Knicks game looked very good on Wilson’s Panasonic — when I tried it on my MacBook, it was pretty blurry.

But it’s better than nothing, which is your only alternative if you’re a Time Warner Cable subscriber in New York City right now (the NBA’s League Pass subscription service, which is supposed to give you access to every game in the league, has a regional blackout).

It’s also worth noting that while Wilson is directing his anger at the cable guys, who are easy and deserving targets, the NBA itself is a supporter of ProtectIP and SOPA, which are designed to make sites like atdhe harder to search for on Google, Twitter, etc.

I’m quite sure that Wilson would say he’s not advocating piracy, but simply trying to access something he’s already paying for (or in other cases, grabbing something he isn’t allowed to buy for unfathomable reasons).

Still, I can imagine a Big Media lobbyist using Wilson’s tweets (or, I suppose, this post) to help explain why the legislation should pass. And I’m certain that’s not what Wilson was aiming for.