Today, Wikipedia, the world’s sixth most visited site, is blacked out, as are thousands of others, including Reddit and Boing Boing. The reason? “The U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet,” the online encyclopedia is informing visitors today. “For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia.”
Presently, similar pieces of legislation are being debated in the House and Senate which aim to prevent the distribution of copyrighted material, but may clamp down on internet freedom. As the House debates the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the Senate may vote as soon as Tuesday on the Protect IP Act (PIPA).
Filmmaker Michael Moore, whose site is blacked out today, questioned the timing of SOPA and PIPA. “I’m sure it’s just an accident that these bills are being proposed after a year where uprisings around the world were literally started on the internet,” Moore wrote in a letter yesterday.
Last month, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) also questioned whether Congress was moving too fast. “We’re going to do surgery on the internet, and we haven’t had a doctor in the room tell us how we’re going to change these organs.”
To raise awareness about these critical issues, TheFightBack is joining with thousands of other sites and going black today.
“This is a scary device to those in power and I’m sure they rue the day they allowed us to talk freely to each other,” Moore said. “They weren’t thinking about the revolution that would cause – they just saw it is a way to sell more stuff. Oops. And now they want to rein it in.”