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Strike to save the internet!


PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

CONTACT YOUR CONGRESSCRITTER TODAY. Tell them not to break the internet. I gave some poor Mark Udall staffer a extensive—though polite—rant.

My idea for a tech company blackout—though clearly other more important people had the same idea—has been adopted today. Wikipedia is down. Reddit and Mozilla are down. Google, though it remains functional, has blacked out its banner in support. If I weren't a little uncomfortable with fiddling with my site code (and more realistically, if I had more than a dozen readers) I would do the same.

For more, here's Julian Sanchez with SOPA: An Architecture for Censorship.

Also, Dan Gillmor makes the important point that this really isn't about stopping piracy. It's about controlling information:
So, why do [SOPA supporters] make unsupportable statements?

Because they don't dare make an honest argument. If they were saying what they believe, it would go roughly this way:
"The internet threatens our longstanding control of information and communications, and that is simply unacceptable. Therefore, it is essential to curb the utility of the internet for everyone else."
That is true.

UPDATE: Check out this gallery of striking sites.

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