This is a day of celebration.

The Euro­pean Par­lia­ment decided to reject ACTA once and for all. This means that the decep­tive treaty is now dead glob­ally. This also means that you can still enjoy a free-ish Inter­net. This is the day when cit­i­zens of Europe and the world won over unelected bureau­crats who were being wooed and lob­bied by the rich­est cor­po­ra­tions of the planet.

The bat­tle­ground wasn’t some admin­is­tra­tive office, but the rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the peo­ple – the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment – which decided in the end to do its job beau­ti­fully, and rep­re­sent the peo­ple against spe­cial interests.

The road to today’s vic­tory was hard and by no means certain.

Six months ago, the sit­u­a­tion looked very dark. It was all but cer­tain that ACTA would pass unno­ticed in silence. The forces fight­ing for cit­i­zens’ rights tried to have it referred to the Euro­pean Court of Jus­tice in order to test its legal­ity and to buy some time. But then, some­thing happened.

A mon­ster by the name of SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) appeared in the United States. Thou­sands of web­sites went dark on Jan­u­ary 18 and mil­lions of voices cried out, leav­ing Con­gress shell-shocked over the fact that cit­i­zens can get that level of pissed off at cor­po­rate spe­cial inter­ests. SOPA was killed.

In the wake of this, as cit­i­zens real­ized that they don’t need to take that kind of cor­po­rate abuse lying down and ask­ing for more, the com­mu­nity flood­lights cen­tered on ACTA.

The activism car­ried over beau­ti­fully to defeat this mon­ster. Early Feb­ru­ary, there were ral­lies all over Europe, leav­ing the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment equally shell-shocked.

The party groups turned on a cent and declared their oppo­si­tion to ACTA in sol­i­dar­ity with the cit­i­zen ral­lies all over the con­ti­nent, after hav­ing real­ized what a piece of shame­less mail-order leg­is­la­tion it really was, to the hor­rors of the cor­po­rate shills who thought this was a done deal. Those shills tried, tried hard, tried right up until today, to post­pone the vote on ACTA past the atten­tion of the pub­lic and the activists.

Alas, they don’t under­stand the net. And there’s one key thing right there: the net doesn’t forget.

Every­one in the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment are tak­ing turns to praise all the activists across Europe and the world for draw­ing their atten­tion to what utter garbage this really was, not some run-of-the-mill rub­ber­stamp paper, but actu­ally a really dan­ger­ous piece of pro­posed legislation.

Every­body thanks the activists for that. Each and every one of us has every rea­son to feel proud today. Today, we stood up for our most basic rights against cor­po­rate giants, and won. Europe cel­e­brates a day of inde­pen­dence from Amer­i­can spe­cial interests.

Con­grat­u­la­tions to all of us, and thanks to all broth­ers and sis­ters on the bar­ri­cades across the world who made this happen.