I really hope you're right about all this. Still wondering why there's no SOPA-style outbreak in any EU country but Poland. Maybe because we all, like me, just sit and wonder?
Greetings from Ireland, where we've spent the whole week kicking the government's arse over a nasty bit of Record-Company-Felching, and a Dáil debate was just forced onto the agenda not 15 minutes ago during an emergency discussion.
Oh, and I note that the largest consumer-facing site in the country just did this: http://boards.ie
However, there is also another, perhaps major, issue: the tech sector is just not as large or impactful as in the US (or, at least, this is the public perception): no community hub such as Silicon Valley, very few dominant businesses, very few startups and VCs capable of flexing their muscles.
I fear that if we are unable to get major US companies to protest ACTA, such legislation might simply slide past unseen by most.
Or maybe I'm just naive (I like to believe that most of our politicians are selfish and stupid, but not corrupt) and missing something.
In Poland, some mainstream media had the balls to talk about ACTA, which coincided with high-profile "hacking" attacks on govt websites. This lead to a sudden spread of public awareness. And when the kids heard that free downloading of mp3s, movies and porn is threatened, they took to the streets. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3502200)
And how did the media learn about ACTA in the first place? That's still a bit of a riddle to me. Certainly some active NGOs, like the Panoptykon Foundation, and enlightened individuals, like Piotr Waglowski (a lawyer of some fame in the digital community) have contributed by constantly pesking the govt about ACTA.
They are usually rather capable of causing a somewhat decent ruckus when nasty stuff happens, and they usually quickly get the support of at least the liberals and the far-right-conservatives (who are pretty consistently in favour of free and open internet though nobody understands why).
Still, nothing about ACTA. Thanks for laying out the Polish case for me though.
This is typical for BoF. "They" decide what's important, behind closed doors. They are no different from ruling political class, which is both their strength (when it comes to lobbying) and their weakness (when it comes to representing the people who's rights they claim to stand up for).
Then negotiators tried hard to keep any interested NGO and independent parties from getting access; inevitably, their interest was piqued even more, and leaks started to appear, as they always do when Evil Stuff is in the works.
I'm pretty sure people like Cory Doctorow were banging the drums about ACTA years ago.
The problem is breaking through to the wider public, to the mainstream media. We managed to do that in Poland.