Wikipedia, one of the world's most visited websites with a reported 25 million visits a day, followed through with its planned 24-hour online "blackout" protest for its English site starting on January 18, 2012. However, its mobile platform was still accessible, as well as a number of tips being revealed online to circumvent its "blackout page" and directly access content.
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| A reporter's laptop shows the Wikipedia blacked out opening page in Brussels. |
Protesting an ongoing debate regarding Intellectual Property (IP) legislation that is currently taking place in the US Congress (Stop Online Piracy Act, SOPA) and the US Senate (Protect IP Act, PIPA) which Wikipedia, and many others in the tech world, suggest is badly worded and could lead to websites being shut down without due process, Wikipedia was also joined in its stance by other mainstream content providers like Google, Craigslist, reddit, WordPress, Mozilla, Flickr, TwitPic, Internet Archive, Tucows, etc., in addition to highly visited pop culture websites/blogs/forums like icanhazcheezburger, Boing Boing, TechCrunch, etc.
Overall, websites usually accessed by hundreds of millions of visitors daily were either temporarily shut down or showed some sort of protest banner on their home page (search out Google's and TechCrunch's blacked out logos from January 18).
The legislation being protested (SOPA and PIPA) has already passed, in one form or another, in countries such as France (2009's Loi Hadopi) and the UK (2010's Digital Economy Act). Further, even the US White House urged caution against such hasty efforts, recently stating that "the openness of the Internet is increasingly central to innovation in business, government, and society and it must be protected." It also further noted that "analysis of the DNS filtering provisions in some proposed legislation suggests that they pose a real risk to cyber security and yet leave contraband goods and services accessible online."
In fact, this is not even the first case of an online protest; web domain host GoDaddy faced a customer exodus number in the thousands after it came out publicly in support of SOPA. It only turned the tide after reversing its opinion and taking a stance, again publicly, against SOPA. |
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