The black outs last for 1-2 days. And all it does is make the sub private (afaik, you will still be able to post and comment on the sub as long as you joined it). This is not going to achieve a single thing.
Also, they can unprivate the subs on their own website if they want to, and pretty sure they have data backups if they delete it. Only the government could do anything about this, but I'm not sure any laws were broken here, they just started charging money for commercial use of their valuable pool of data.
Communities went dark in protest due to reddit not shutting down vaccine conspiracy subreddits during the pandemic forcing reddit to act.
They also went dark when reddit failed to properly vet a new hire who had been a politician with a weird link to bad acts involving a child, forcing reddit to remove them.
There have been other protests forcing responses too. I remember one involving poor moderation tools, and another involving the BLM protests.
Well, let me tell you the difference between those protests and this one - Reddit had nothing to lose by giving in to those demands, only something to gain from better PR.
They have everything to lose by giving into demands here, losing out on corpos paying bank to have access to all their data. They gained nothing from allowing third party apps, they just serve their content with the ads stripped (thus only lose revenue). While I do pity them, they should have expected this to happen at some point.
Also, they can unprivate the subs on their own website if they want to, and pretty sure they have data backups if they delete it. Only the government could do anything about this, but I'm not sure any laws were broken here, they just started charging money for commercial use of their valuable pool of data.