In either a response to US Government pressure or a decision made for other more ‘official’ reasons, Amazon, Paypal, Visa, Mastercard have recently gained additional international prominence. Normally this is a good thing for business. In this case, it’s totally not.
Amazon, Paypal, Visa and Mastercard are all globally recognized brands. They are the kinds of brands we don’t think about much, but we trust them to do the job they do; transact our money, keep it safe, host our websites, etc and don’t get too outwardly involved in our lives. But lately in efforts that look suspiciously like they are calculated to cripple the critical operations and infrastructure of Wikileaks these brands have breached that trust. Amazon kicked Wikileaks off its servers and Paypal, Visa and Mastercard have stopped processing Wikileaks donation payments. They have openly attempted to remove the Wikileaks home and cut off its money supply. Even Twitter has been repeatedly (and I think justifiably) accused by many who use the service of censoring and attempting to hide the Wikileaks conversation from the world. These brands are trying to kill what they deem to be the beast. In doing so they’ve been very successful in gaining the attention they normally crave. But at the same time they have given a very strong signal to many current and future customers that they are far from independent organizations and their neutral position in what most people have believed to be a democracy has been seriously called into question.
Outsiders can now clearly see the strong relationship that these companies have with the US government; their collusion has now been exposed to the world. The massively important consumer trust that takes years and years and millions and millions of dollars to build and strengthen through repeated friendly, feel-good advertising messages has been almost instantly eroded by these brands’ own very public actions.
The Twitterverse has gone not just Ballistic at these brands (including Twitter), but ‘Intercontinental Ballistic’, firing at them from all corners of the world with multiple accusing, questioning and threatening missiles in all languages. You are a cartel of #banksters. We can’t trust you anymore. You’re anti-democratic. What law has Wikileaks broken? Who do you represent? Do you want my business? Are you sick of having customers? Don’t you understand that the power equation has changed? Don’t you know that it’s people who have the power now? We are going to get you. You wont get away with this. It’s time for #operationpayback.
These brands in collusion with the US government or on their own terms have unwittingly succeeded in helping to unleash the (until now) mostly dormant democratic mechanism for mass people power that is the Internet. They have woken up the sleeping apathetic masses in the west who in this first World InfoWar are being organized into decentralized digital fighting units by groups led by the frontline generals at Anonymous, an online activism collective with a clear mandate: preserve internet freedom and freedom of speech for all. As they say "... The goal is simple: Win the right to keep the Internet free of any control from any entity, corporation, or government. We will do this until our, proverbial, dying breath." (Read their full statement here: http://bit.ly/fM6Q78). All this marks the beginnings of a genuine online revolution and the people are now actively combating these companies on several fronts.
The main concern for PayPal, Visa, Mastercard and Amazon must be the huge amount of negative publicity being generated by their actions and the viral effect that is taking place because of this. It has the nasty side effect of sending their customers searching for alternatives while drawing more and more consumers attention to their questionable decisions on Wikileaks. Thus they are helping to set themselves up for a bigger counterattack.
The Anonymous collective, the engaged Twitteratti, Facebookers, Wikileaks know this. They know that by calling the huge numbers of online troops to exercise their democratic right to boycott these brands and display their anger directly through Twitter hashtag identifiers such as #boycottpaypal, #boycottmastercard, #boycottvisa, #boycottamazon and by encouraging the actual public rejection of these services by individuals they can inflict real economic and brand damage on these companies. If I was a shareholder in any of these companies, I would have to be asking the company board; is it in my best interest that you have stopped providing essential services to Wikileaks - or not? If the share-price falls, am I losing my hard earned money because you seem to have no backbone or integrity or interest in democracy? Or is there a link between you and the government that has not been fully disclosed? Have I been deprived of vital information that may have better informed my decision to invest in your company? A cable released around 8th December adds some credence to these questions and possibly provides a case for shareholders: http://bit.ly/gBBMrZ
The arrogant financial brands aren’t the only ones doing themselves major damage. Wikileaks has had its URL removed from the net by domain name company EveryDNS (so you can’t search wikileaks.org’ anymore) and it’s been denied the use of servers by Amazon so it has no backend infrastructure. This action by these two brands has made the site stronger and their own brands weaker. Many internet users are now setting up ‘mirror’ Wikileaks websites that serve and hold the same content as Wikileaks and its disclosed cables but under different online addresses. So when there was one ‘Wikileaks.org’ online before, there are now hundreds and hundreds, more and more daily under hundreds of different addresses. Check them out here: http://bit.ly/ej9kwQ . Unstoppable.
On another significant and symbolic front, Anonymous and its global network are systematically taking down the 'shopfront' websites of anyone they see to be the enemy of free speech. This is no more than an awareness campaign to highlight that point. These website attacks do not harm ordinary people and their transactions, but the technical disruption helps to create global PR around the extremely important freedom of information and speech issue. To date the websites of Paypal, Visa, Mastercard, the Swiss bank ‘PostFinance’ have all been taken down in DDoS attacks as part of #operationpayback. Amazon, EveryDNS and Twitter are also possibly in the firing line here. As Twitter user “LauVanExel” said recently: “#Visa #MasterCard #PayPal all down. Twitter might be next so I heard so be prepared.”
The reason for all this fuss is a big and very serious fear - that Wikileaks is being used as a Scapegoat for a wider campaign to change fundamental democratic laws in order to censor internet content and deny users the current freedom they enjoy. And with all these brands actions against Wikileaks they have very effectively positioned themselves alongside the government as the bad guys who don’t give a toss about democracy or the views of their customers. I really don’t think all this can be good for business.
On December 9, 2010, Twitter user ‘Jamesrbuk’ summed up the real argument while referencing the ongoing self inflicted damage being done to these brands when he said:
For freedom of speech, there's #wikileaks. For everything else, there's #Mastercard. And #Visa. And, um, #Paypal. And #Amazon. And...”
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