Big tech lobbyists would drum up opposition to the plan and lawmakers who support it– the Protect IP Act proves.

It used to be that a round of golf followed by a round of thick steaks, stiff drinks and the promise of a campaign contribution were all it took for a lobbyist to butter up a lawmaker. But Congress put an end to these swanky meals and gifts in 2007, after a corruption scandal in which more than 20 lobbyists, political aides and public officials pleaded guilty or were convicted on federal charges. Though companies were still permitted to make campaign donations, the banning of gifts was a catastrophe for K Street, the avenue in Washington, D.C., where lobbyists have their offices. But it did not take long for K Street to figure out an ingenious way around the new rules. Today’s most effective corporate lobbying no longer involves wooing members of Congress with Chateau Margaux, five-star meals or tickets to professional sporting events. K Street’s elite now works in secret to influence lawmakers with the help of an unlikely ally: you. Though appealing to the public has long been part of the lobbying playbook, it has taken a much more sophisticated form in the years since lobbyists were banned from using the traditional tools of their trade to curry favor with elected officials. They recognized that, given the new restrictions, the best way to influence members of Congress was through the people who sent them to Washington in the first place.

With an election always just around the corner, members of Congress are uncomfortable taking actions that are not popular with voters back home. And they’re eager to support issues and causes that have—or appear to have—popular support among their constituents. With this incentive structure in mind, lobbyists began spending more of their time targeting ordinary people living thousands of miles outside the Beltway. They teamed up with PR gurus, social-media experts, political pollsters, data analysts and grassroots organizers to foment seemingly organic public outcries designed to pressure lawmakers and compel them to take actions that would benefit the lobbyists’ corporate clients. A pivotal point in this evolution away from old-fashioned inside strategies to a more advanced “outside” approach occurred in 2011, during a battle pitting the then-upstart technology industry against the Goliaths of Washington’s corporate lobbying establishment. At the time, the tech industry was far from the dominant player it’s become today. But powerful corporate actors, from Hollywood to Wall Street, recognized the threat that Google and its peers might pose to their future profits and began searching for ways to undercut their new competitors. They saw an opportunity in pushing federal legislation to hold internet platforms legally liable for certain content put on their platforms by users. Though the legislation was relatively narrow in scope—it would have given law-enforcement authorities tools to crack down on websites that housed illegal or pirated content on servers in other countries—the internet companies and their allies presented it as an existential threat. The bill, known in the Senate as the PROTECT IP Act or PIPA, “would have destroyed the ecosystem of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr,” said Ernesto Falcon, who lobbied against the legislation at the time. Tech companies said the measure would force them to spend millions of dollars policing user-generated content, which would put many of them out of business and stifle the growth of the internet.

By the middle of 2011, an army of lobbyists working for the pillars of the corporate lobbying establishment—the major movie studios, the music industry, pharmaceutical manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—were executing a nearly $100 million campaign to win approval for the internet bill. They pressured scores of lawmakers to co-sponsor the legislation. At one point, 99 of the 100 members of the U.S. Senate appeared ready to support it—an astounding number, given that most bills have just a handful of co-sponsors before they are called up for a vote. When lobbyists for Google and its allies went to Capitol Hill, they made little headway. Against such well-financed and influential opponents, the futility of the traditional lobbying approach became clear. If tech companies were going to turn back the anti-piracy bills, they would need to find another way. It was around this time that one of Google’s Washington strategists suggested an alternative strategy. “Let’s rally our users,” Adam Kovacevich, then 34 and a senior member of Google’s Washington office, told colleagues. Kovacevich turned Google’s opposition to the anti-piracy legislation into a coast-to-coast political influence effort with all the bells and whistles of a presidential campaign. The goal: to whip up enough opposition to the legislation among ordinary Americans that Congress would be forced to abandon the effort.

To administer the campaign, Google brought in veteran political strategists and advertising firms. It set up the kind of “war room” that Bill Clinton’s campaign had made famous during the 1992 race. Like any well-financed presidential bid, the Google team hired pollsters and focus groups to craft messaging for their effort. The campaign slogan they settled on—“Don’t Kill the Internet”—exaggerated the likely impact of the bill, but it succeeded in stirring apprehension among web users. The coup de grace came on Jan. 18, 2012, when Google and its allies pulled off the mother of all outside influence campaigns. When users logged on to the web that day, they discovered, to their great frustration, that many of the sites they’d come to rely on—Wikipedia, Reddit, Craigslist—were either blacked out or displayed text outlining the detrimental impacts of the proposed legislation. For its part, Google inserted a black censorship bar over its multicolored logo and posted a tool that enabled users to contact their elected representatives. “Tell Congress: Please don’t censor the web!” a message on Google’s home page read. With some 115,000 websites taking part, the protest achieved a staggering reach. Tens of millions of people visited Wikipedia’s blacked-out website, 4.5 million users signed a Google petition opposing the legislation, and more than 2.4 million people took to Twitter to express their views on the bills. “We must stop [these bills] to keep the web open & free,” the reality TV star Kim Kardashian wrote in a tweet to her 10 million followers.

As millions of ordinary Americans became unwitting foot soldiers in the campaign to kill the bills, congressional offices were swamped with angry messages from constituents. One irate internet user called her senator’s office and demanded directions to the closest McDonald’s restaurant. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” a confused Senate aide responded. “How would I know where your nearest McDonald’s is?” “If you hadn’t shut down the internet, I could find it myself,” the caller said. “So now I need you to tell me.” With bracing speed, the public outcry began to dismantle the legislation’s support. During a meeting with fellow House Republicans, Oklahoma congressman Tom Cole barked, “If this bill is so good, why don’t I have 2,000 constituents calling and saying how good it is? Because I have 2,000 people calling me and saying how bad it is.” An aide to Democrat Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania contacted Google’s lobbying office with a simple plea: “Can you tell people to stop calling our office?” Within two days, the legislation was dead. It was a historic, high-stakes demonstration of how a state-of-the-art effort to shape public opinion could vanquish a campaign rooted in old-fashioned insider lobbying and campaign contributions. Former Sen. Chris Dodd, who advocated for the bills as the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, said he couldn’t recall seeing “an effort that was moving with this degree of support change this dramatically.” Over the following decade, outside influence tactics would become the cornerstone of Washington’s lobbying industry—and they remain so today.