As the internet's avatar Google uses its huge billboard -- the search screen -- to protest the proposed legislation aimed at enhancing intellectual property rights (or censoring the Net, depending on your point of view), some say this is the first time Netizens have used their prowess to lobby.

That's not accurate.

In my term as FCC chair, AOL mounted a massive user-based email campaign to defend my decision to bar narrowband internet access providers (telephone companies) from charging end users for using a telephone line to reach the internet, instead of just making a voice phone call. This was a seminal moment in the development of the internet, and the first exercise of the medium itself to defend the "free" culture of the new common medium.

Since then, e mail lobbying has become a common technique for all who seek to persuade lawmakers. But those who control the instruments of communication always have a special advantage in lobbying, if they use those instruments to express a point of view, as opposed to turning their position into money by selling ads or providing other commercial services.

In every election cycle, for example, at least some broadcasters use air time to argue for or against a candidate. That's what Sinclair Broadcasting did in launching its fake documentary "swift boat" attacks against John Kerry in 2004. And when the FCC or Congress threatens to repurpose some of the vast and scarcely used spectrum allocated to broadcasters, their lobbyists merely need to threaten an ad campaign (cheap because the TV stations don't have to raise money to buy time from themselves!) in order to cow Congressmen into compliance with their wishes. So Bob Dole complained on the Senate floor in the mid 90s when he dared cross that industry.

What's interesting about the Google and Wikipedia and other protests is not that they are unprecedented. It is that they use the new meta-platforms of networked content in two important ways. First, these billboards on the "information highway" have very large reach -- almost as broad as that living dinosaur TV! Second, the "advertisers" are making their point by means of interfering with their own usefulness. Internet users have come to regard search, wikis, Facebook, You tube and a handful of other services as if they were utilities like electricity or gasoline stations. This is good for the new virtual utilities, especially when they are, as is the case, scarcely regulated, and can profit from their position any which way they can. But when a utility of any widespread kind adulterates its service, consumers can rise to a fever pitch of protest (think Netflix) and once the see a crowd gather, even in virtual space, politicians will try to get in front so as to appear to lead the effort to sanction the utility. So getting attention on the sacrosanct if whimsical search page, or creating "dumb for a day" by blacking out Wikipedia, is a dangerous way to make a point to Congress.

Yet the point here needs making, in full, with lots of information --which is the great glorious capability of the Net. The internet is the common medium now. It has a distinctive culture. It shares much content, from innumerable sources. The copyright laws as Congress now threatens to rewrite them are not in sync with the Internet's mores. (No surprise that this Congress is not aligned with most Americans' preferences!)

What's necessary here is that not just symbolic acts by Google and Wikipedia should remind Congress that the government is of, by, and for the people (and that doesn't mean corporations as people). All internet companies should use their position on the common medium to inform internet users --that's almost all of us -- truthfully and accurately of what is at stake when Congress takes pen in hand. So don't go dark Wikipedia: tell us what's going down. Don't black mark your page Google, but try to inform us. And it wouldn't do any harm if the Executive Branch and the FCC were even clearer (they've done a lot already) than they have been. Repeat. Repeat. Eventually we will all understand what Congress proposes, what Hollywood wants, and what the Internet needs. Then maybe we can get to a good rewrite of laws that really do need fixing.