I think that you are giving people too much credit. Switching domain registrars has virtually no impact for those who register domain names. Not watching certain movies or television shows or having to avoid certain video games is asking too much of most people.
You are stating another reason more than refuting his. I'm not disagreeing with your reason but his point is that this is big from Congress' perspective as we can now safely say that there are 0 internet companies in support of this. Whereas before Congress saw a mixed signal they now see unison in one of our country's most important growth industries. And that is big.
And I don't know if you've transfered domains before but I didn't have a good time doing it. Though it was not difficult I think we've seen some tremendous overstatements in this thread as to how easy it actually works out in practice.
And for me at least it's not that it not difficult to not watch ESPN. People don't live in a world without choices -- usually when they buy Battlefield they are also considering MW3 or the Batman game. There are some die-hard fans but also a lot of us that like football but are perfectly happy watching an episode or two of Breaking Bad instead if that's on. The NFL needs casual fans too, and those are the ones we should think about when we think about boycotts. Of course it will seem hopeless if you think about the guy with his face painted blue but I'm asking you to think of the guy flipping channels at home.
You only need to sway opinion a tiny little bit to change things considerably -- this is why boycotts work so damn well. The hardest thing to get over the common cynical attitude that "people won't do it, therefore we should not try."
(you should check out some Gandhi -- he explains far better than I ever can why boycotts aren't just effective but arguably the most effective tool that ordinary citizens have, and also almost always much easier to execute than we think they are)
I know a bunch of sports fans of all sorts but mostly I know me, and I know that I have a DVR & all kinds of netflix videos to catch up on that compete for my (damn-near-zero) entertainment time with the NFL. Personally I gave up the NFL as a result of this -- so maybe I'm a bad example. And I'm done with ESPN too. Really, I haven't noticed in the week that has gone by so far. And I love sports -- I'll watch NBA and MLB games and my life will be quite alright. I'll even play sports videogames & read about sports & watch sports news on television & I will do it without watching ESPN or the NFL.
So I'll give you that the freaks won't switch but I don't think you'll give me that the casual fans will if they associate the NFL or ESPN with these bad things.
Out of curiosity, would you be able to give up ESPN or the NFL or even one of those things? I'm not saying give up everything, but can't you see that if everyone who was upset even chose one company to boycott that it would do something?
