Wikipedia, Google Blackout Sites to Protest SOPA
Google and Craigslist ask their users to vote against SOPA
Wikipedia's English-language pages went black for 24 hours to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act. The splash page displays an announcement which says that the legislation offered by SOPA could fatally damage the free and open Internet. Google and Craigslist also joined the virtual protest asking their users to contact Congress and vote against the Stop Online Piracy Act.
The online encyclopedia's blackout, intended to precede next week's Senate floor vote on the legislation, is scheduled to last 24 hours. Craigslist and Google have taken a more modest approach. Unlike Wikipedia, the sites will remain online during Wednesday's virtual protest, but the home pages now feature exhortations to contact members of Congress and urge them to vote against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Senate version called Protect IP.
It's a novel experiment in grassroots-outreach-by-the-millions that could, if successful, derail SOPA and Protect IP, which have come under increasing criticism since last fall. Their authors -- Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) -- responded in the last week by offering some changes. But Smith said in a statement today that, one way or another, a House committee vote will be held in February.
Among the other Web sites that, in one way or another, have joined the blackout: Metafilter, the Consumer Electronics Association, BoingBoing, OpenDNS, WordPress, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and what is almost certainly the Internet's most popular dinosaur comic strip. Some physical protests are also planned tomorrow.
Because Web companies are typically reluctant to involve their users in political spats, nothing exactly like today's protest has ever been tried before, and it's difficult to predict how it will affect Congress' willingness to proceed. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid indicated on Sunday that he expected the floor vote on Protect IP to happen as scheduled.
But Google.com is the most popular Web site in the world, according to Alexa, with about half of global Internet users visiting it per day -- meaning that if only a small percent sign the company's petition against SOPA and Protect IP, the total number of voters lodging protests could be in the hundreds of thousands or even millions.
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