The Big Hammer of SOPA, PIPA Will Only Crush Internet Freedom

Wednesday, Jan. 18th marks the day when many workers were far more productive and many know-it-alls were a far less smug about themselves. And suspiciously so, in both cases. Many of the Internet’s most important sites and services are going dark for 12 hours to protest the progress of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) through the House of Representatives and the Senate.

The list includes Reddit, the great pulse of the Web; BoingBoing, barometer of culture; even the English-language edition of Wikipedia will go away for a bit and then come back after an important point has been made: like any other web, the worldwide web of the internet is a frail, fragile thing that can easily go away. We mustn’t take it for granted. And we sure shouldn’t allow it to be broken by terrible, misguided legislation that serves the interests of one commercial industry and which shunts hundreds of millions of Americans into a form of second-class world Internet citizenship...