So that happened.
Wikipedia went dark yesterday for 24 hours, Reddit blacked out too, and Google slapped that black censor bar over their logo like they were live-blogging their own indictment. And then, like the universe has a sense of humor, about twelve hours after the blackout ended the DOJ went and took down Megaupload anyway. Kim Dotcom, yes that's apparently a real legal name now, he changed it from Kim Schmitz a while back, got arrested in a raid on his mansion in New Zealand, complete with helicopters and the cops cutting through some kind of panic room door. I saw a photo of the guy's car collection this morning and I have questions about how a file-locker site pays for that many Mercedes.
I want to talk about the blackout first because I think today, the morning after, is actually the more interesting day than yesterday was. Yesterday was theater. Today is when we find out if the theater did anything.
And it looks like it might have. I refreshed my feed reader about nine times before 10am and the story that keeps showing up is senators quietly peeling off. Marco Rubio came out yesterday and said he was pulling his name off PIPA, which is a pretty notable flip for a guy who co-sponsored the thing. He's not going to be the last. I've seen a handful of other co-sponsors either walking it back or suddenly discovering they have "concerns about the current language," which is Washington-speak for "my phones haven't stopped ringing since Tuesday and I'd like them to stop." A bill with this many co-sponsors bleeding support in under 48 hours is not normal. I don't think I've seen anything like it, and I've only been half paying attention to Congress for like a decade.
Whether that actually kills the bill is a different question than whether the protest "worked" in the sense of getting attention. Getting attention was never going to be the hard part, you black out the most-visited reference site on the internet, people notice. The hard part is whether attention turns into an actual vote count changing, and it looks like, at least for a few names, it did. That's more than I expected honestly. I said something dismissive about online petitions a couple months back and I'll cop to being wrong about how much this one mattered.
Now the Megaupload thing. The timing is almost too perfect, and I've seen a bunch of people this morning arguing it either proves SOPA is unnecessary (look, the DOJ just took down a giant piracy operation using laws that already exist, no new legislation required) or that it proves the opposite (see, this is exactly the kind of enforcement SOPA supporters wanted, just aimed overseas). I lean toward the first read. If the government can indict Dotcom and freeze the site with existing wire fraud and copyright statutes, the argument that Hollywood desperately needs a new law with DNS-blocking powers gets a lot weaker overnight, not stronger.
And then Anonymous did the thing Anonymous does, which is DDoS half of official Washington and the entertainment industry within a few hours of the arrest. DOJ.gov, FBI.gov, the MPAA and RIAA sites, Universal Music's site, all of them got knocked offline or wobbly last night. Universal apparently made the list because they were the ones who filed takedown notices against a Megaupload promotional video a while back, which is a pretty deep cut of a grudge to be settling with a botnet. I don't love vigilante DDoS as a form of protest, for the record, it doesn't actually change anyone's mind, it just makes a website unreachable for a few hours and gives news anchors something to say "hacker collective" about. But I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a fitting, chaotic cap to the last 48 hours.
What happens next is the actual question and nobody knows yet. The Senate vote on PIPA is still scheduled, last I saw, for next week, though I'd bet real money that date moves. If enough senators keep dropping off between now and then it might not even come up for a vote in its current form, which would be the closest thing to a clean win the anti-SOPA side gets. I'm not going to pretend I know how this shakes out. I just know that two days ago I would've bet this bill sails through, and this morning I genuinely don't know anymore, and that alone is a pretty big shift for one week in January.