blackout warden

Although the White House and the US congressional contingency sponsoring SOPA has flinched, abandoning language that provides for a government firewall that blocks out whole swathes of the internet, nodding to some expert testimony and perhaps in hope of appeasing protestors who demonstrated how DNS blacklisting could invite more security problems and damage the architecture of the internet, the remaining provisions of SOPA are still devious and misguided and give Hollywood too many choke-points (any link), to stifle creativity and reporting. On Wednesday (18. January), many diverse websites are going dark in protest to this bill’s impending passage, to illustrate how broke down the internet could become if America enacts this law. People world-wide ought to join in, because the internet knows no borders, and no one suffered the privations or propaganda that tried to quell past and more recent uprisings. America fortunately does not control the internet, though maybe pressure is mounting for the US to act as if it does, and ought to receive a strong signal that such meddling in media and in politics and in the economy is unwelcome, especially through such cowardly, backdoor channels.