One item you will not see in Compliance Week's news archives is any coverage of SOPA and PIPA, those two cutely named bills in Congress intended to fight Internet piracy—bills that had seemed destined for passage, until users of the Internet revolted against the measures earlier this week. You saw the stunts, I'm sure: Wikipedia closed for 24 hours on Jan. 17, Google with a funereal black band draped across its search engine, people running black patches over their Facebook profile photos. Clever stuff.
Compliance Week wouldn't normally monitor bills like SOPA and PIPA since copyright infringement isn't much of a compliance concern; that's more the purview of the assistant general counsel for intellectual property over in legal. But how critics took down SOPA and PIPA—which now appear to be as quixotic as Ron Paul's presidential campaign—that bears careful watching.
This tactic of online activism is not new: Bank of America, Verizon and Netflix were all stung in 2011 by online outrage over proposed new fees. But the defeat of SOPA and PIPA was the first instance of online activism steering public policy. Even if BofA, Verizon and Netflix had succeeded in imposing their fees, you could always stop doing business with them. All of us, however, will experience the consequences of SOPA and PIPA's demise whether we like it or not—and many businesses, including my own, had quite legitimate reasons to want those laws passed.
I often wonder how compliance, risk, and governance executives can cope in this coming world of surge activism, where clever use of the Internet's power can harness millions of people with only a passing interest in some issue and turn that into a sudden, gigantic force. Surely we'll see more potent activism against corporate boards (first noted in 2007 when online protests led Yahoo to part ways with then-CEO Terry Semel) and against bloated executive pay packages. We'll see more paralysis in public policy debates, although “heart attack” might be a better word then “paralysis,” since what we'll see will be sudden collapses of efforts that had previously appeared viable. Good luck navigating policy development, risk analysis, and boardroom leadership through that world.
Then again, how might compliance executives turn surge activism to their advantage? I wonder about that, too. Many are the stories of compliance officers using social media to convey a message out to employees, or to let those employees bring concerns back to you. That's certainly innovative, but it still is mostly a way for the compliance officer to reach each individual directly—which is not the same as empowering employees to act collectively to achieve some goal. And let's face it: If you develop a way to let employees act in concert to pursue better ethics and compliance, they'll figure out how to use it to pursue other goals, too. I suspect most senior leaders won't relish that prospect.
As cliché as it sounds, surge activism really does fit that old saying, “If you can't beat them, join them.” This form of activism is here to stay. If you ignore it, you'll find yourself on the losing side of things like the stalwart media empires that fought for SOPA and PIPA. But how can ethics and compliance officers climb on the train, and use this new reality to your advantage? Drop a line and let me know.