So I sat down around 9am to look something up on Wikipedia — I honestly don't even remember what, some dumb trivia thing — and instead of the article I got a black page with a big message about SOPA and PIPA and a link to "find your representative." Just blacked out. All of English Wikipedia. Gone for 24 hours. And I sat there for a solid ten seconds just staring at it like my internet was broken.
It's not broken. This is the blackout. It's actually happening.
I knew it was coming, everybody's been talking about it for a week, but knowing about it and then actually running into the wall is different. I went to Reddit next just to see, and yep, same deal, front page replaced with blackout messaging. Google's homepage still loads but the logo has that black censorship bar across it, and if you click it, it takes you to a page asking you to sign a petition against the bills. Even BoingBoing's got the whole "don't censor the web" banner up. It's genuinely strange to open your browser on a random Wednesday and have this many sites just... not be themselves.
For anyone who's somehow missed the last month of this: SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (PROTECT IP Act) are the two bills working through the House and Senate that are supposed to crack down on foreign sites that traffic in pirated movies and counterfeit goods. Sounds reasonable enough on paper. The problem is how they're written — the enforcement mechanism basically lets the DOJ or even private rights holders go after entire domains, force ISPs to block them, force search engines to de-list them, force payment processors to cut them off, all without much in the way of due process before the site's already been nuked. People who actually understand how DNS works have been screaming for weeks that this breaks the internet at a technical level, not just a "this is bad policy" level. I watched some of the House Judiciary hearings back in December and it was almost funny how few of the people voting on this seemed to understand what a DNS server even does.
Where I land on it: I think piracy is a real problem and I get why the MPAA and RIAA want a bigger hammer. But this bill is the wrong hammer. Giving that much power to shut first, ask questions later, aimed at a technology none of the bill's authors seem to understand, is a recipe for exactly the kind of collateral damage everyone's worried about. A small site gets flagged because some user posted a copyrighted clip in a comment section, and suddenly the whole thing's invisible. That's not a hypothetical, that's just how broad blocking tools get used in practice. I'm not usually one for internet-activism-of-the-week stuff (there's a new outrage every six days it feels like), but this one I actually think is worth the noise.
Browsing today has been kind of a weird experience honestly. I needed to double check a release date for something I'm writing about later this week and my instinct was Wikipedia, obviously, and it just wasn't there. Had to go dig up the actual source instead, which, fine, that's probably good practice anyway, but it made me realize how much I lean on that one site as a first stop for basically everything. Also a bunch of smaller sites I read regularly have gone dark too or at least thrown up protest banners, so my usual morning scroll through my RSS reader is just full of blackout notices instead of actual posts. Kind of eerie in a low-key way.
Random aside, completely unrelated: I've had my coffee maker die on me twice this month and I'm starting to think it's not a coincidence, it's just a cheap machine and I bought it because it was $19 on sale back in November. You get what you pay for I guess. Anyway.
Point is, my phone (still poking around with Siri on the 4S, still not totally sold on it honestly) keeps buzzing with people posting about calling their senators, which is not something I usually see clog up my feed. Whatever the outcome ends up being, it's kind of remarkable that Wikipedia going dark for a day is the thing that made this bill a mainstream conversation instead of a niche policy fight. Guess we'll see where it goes from here.