The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) was a bad bill to begin with and somehow just got worse and worse with each iteration. Its best chance was being slipped into unrelated legislation that no one in Congress could afford to block.

Earlier this month, it seemed like that might happen.  Proponents added this controversial, unconstitutional, poorly-conceived piece of legislation to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a routine but “must-pass” military budget bill. Thanks to all of you who spoke against this trick and forced the JCPA to be considered on its own merits.

While many like to frame the opposition to the JCPA as that of Big Tech, we know better. The union that represents many reporters was against it. Civil society and Big Tech opponents were against it. And most importantly, you were against it. You drove thousands of messages to Congress exposing this bill as dangerous to the free flow of information online.

We couldn’t rest after that fight because while the NDAA had closed its doors to the JCPA, there was still a chance that it would be added to the end-of-year omnibus, a massive spending bill that lays out the budget for the government for the next fiscal year and routinely gets all sorts of other bills added to it. But we kept pushing—you kept pushing—and it appears we have finally won.

Thank you, we could not have done it without you. Hopefully, this lets Congress know that a link tax is not how you help journalists.