Web Stands on SOPA Box for Internet Blackout
If you had never heard of it before, chances are you heard of SOPA in oneway or another when you logged into the internet last week. On WednesdayJanuary 18 the internet went black to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act thatmany fear would open the door to government censorship of online communication.
Across the board sites like Google, Wikipedia, Wordpress, Craigslist andmany more pulled their homepages and directed users to information about theSOPA and PIPA (Protect IP ACT) legislation currently being debated in Congress.Even though Facebook didn’t directly participate in the strike, wallseverywhere were filled with opinions on the subject. While most urged people toparticipate, one friend of mine offered an interesting perspective on thetopic.“I don’t need internet giants (i.e. big corporation, how ironic) tellingme to protest. If we were a people of integrity maybe piracy wouldn’t be anissue. Government shouldn’t be regulating that any more than Google should tellme when to protest. They are just as guilty of censorship as big brother.Remember what search results came up when you typed in “Christian” versus“Muslim”. They have no business complaining about censorship. It’s a bandwagonfor them to jump on for free name-dropping. –Joe”Whether it’s a bandwagon or asoap box the backlash from the internet strike is evident. Take a look at someof the statistics: 10,000,000 signatures were collected petitioning against theproposal.Over 3,000,000 emails were sent to congress members, so many that ittemporarily crashed their servers. 115,000+ sites participated by removingcontent or adding sensor bars.83,914 people changed their profile pictures inspeaking out against SOPA and PIPA.At the beginning of the day 6 senators wereagainst PIPA; by 8pm 34 publicly denounced it.At the end of the day the sitesthat shut down drew more traffic than before. So maybe my friend Joe is rightand the protest was part propaganda but it worked so well because people acrossthe country spoke up for something they feel strongly about. So what do youthink about the proposed SOPA and PIPA regulations?By Heather Fairchild – Heather is a multimedia developer with experience inweb, film, photography and animation as well as traditional fine arts likepainting and sculpting. In addition to writing for Beyond.com, she is co-founder of a design andpromotion company. Heather’s spare time consists of making puppets, teachingSunday School, building Legos and doing science experiments with herchildren.
