If you’re like the average internet user, odds are very good that you’ve tried loading up Google today – almost every internet consumer uses it at least once a day. If you have, you’ve surely noticed the bold blackout over the Google logo. With any luck, that’s piqued your interest enough to get you to click through on it – and sign the attached petition against SOPA and PIPA, the looming bills before Congress that would impose true censorship on any website with user generated content (comments, photos, articles, anything).
The Google logo looked like this all day.
Just in case you missed the darkened Google logo, however, there are plenty of other ways you may have encountered a rapidly shuttering internet. Wikipedia, Reddit, DailyKos, and dozens of other sites have joined in, some of them shutting their portals entirely and leaving up only warnings of the impending censorship of the web, with tools for contacting your representatives attached.
The ongoing anti-SOPA/PIPA campaign has already had a serious impact, forcing Congress to strip some of the worst provisions from the bill, but this next step looks poised to have an even more dramatic effect. The response has been overwhelming so far; in fact, as of 12:23 PM Eastern, the website for the US Senate which hosts the “contact” forms for each Senator appears to have been overloaded for almost all of the Senators, presumably from informed citizens looking to send an email complaints their way (that’s certainly why I went to the site).
On the other hand, the Google and Wikipedia links to Congressional contact forms and a petition remain active. I am extremely eager to see what kind of numbers the drive is going to generate from otherwise low-information voters; political blogs of all stripes have been on the case for months about this (as it threatens their very existence, making this a free speech issue as well) but Google and Wikipedia are cornerstones of the web for even the most casual user who may have no idea what SOPA and PIPA are. Thanks to this campaign, that has now changed.
Related posts:
- SLIDESHOW : Inauguration Day in Images
- Privacy lawsuit targets ‘Net giants over “zombie” cookies
- Beginners FOSS localisation manual released on International Translation Day
- Tripline.net
- Raise Your Windows IQ: How to Share a Link, Part 2
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 19th, 2012 at 5:39 am and is filed under Mozilla Firefox Free Download. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
