Today, January 18th 2012, is the day where the war for the future of internet progressing to the web itself as many websites/blogs are moving the battlefield into the virtual world.
In order to stop the controversial internet censorship legislation (the SOPA and PIPA bills) many online companies are taking a stand with an active action to protest and to demonstrate their gigantic opposition to the legislation with the biggest online protest in the history.
The protest already produced a big win after the SOPA bill has been withdrawn from the table (for the time being), however, Congress will vote on the PIPA bill on January 24th. So today, many sites will display their opposition by showing a simple logo or a message on their homepage and many more have blackout their site completely.
Who’s In Front?
The leader of the struggle is the social news site, Reddit, that announced first on a 12 hours blackout. Soon after, many other websites have joined the effort and declared on January 18th as a day to protest against SOPA/PIPA. Here’s a list of the most prominent web companies that are taking part in today online protest:
Wikipedia- Wikipedia (in English) is probably the most significant participant in the struggle that took the radical step of going completely dark for 24 hours. Here’s the message you will see when you try to enter some Wikipedia page in English today:
Google- The search giant has “blacked” its regular logo on its homepage in the USA (as in the photo below) and added a link below the search box (worldwide) to a page describing what is the SOPA and PIPA bills and why are they bad.
WordPress.org- Users that will visit the site will encounter a message (see below), a video about how the legislation will “break the internet” and information on how to take action. It still allows normal browsing with the option to go back to the regular site at the bottom of the page.
Many more popular websites and blogs are also protesting by changing the theme of their sites, their logos (like i changed mine) and posting special homepages, so don’t be surprised if the main color across the web today is black!