The Jan 18th SOPA & PIPA strike is over and sites are coming back online. But, I found it to be an interesting experience. About half of the websites I use regularly, perhaps more, were blacked out for the bulk of the day. Of those that weren’t unavailable, they still had blacked out or censored images to show their disagreement with the bills. Google, among them.
When I first saw that Google had only blacked-out their logo, I was disappointed that they hadn’t gone with a full site outage as protest. But, by afternoon, I understood: its hard to appreciate a global internet blackout, if you don’t know about it. By Afternoon, I had discovered, largely through Google searches, just how pervasive the blackout protest had become. I found myself getting frustrated when site after site was unavailable.
I probably would have read about it in the days afterwards, but it makes a much greater impact when you can experience it your self.
Hopefully we all made enough of am impact to permanently kill SOPA & PIPA, otherwise we may find the Internet to look a bit different and to be a bit less useful if one of these bills pass and is signed into law.