Wikipedia will be going dark on Wednesday in protest against two Congressional bills – the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). The announcement was made by Co-Founder Jimmy Wales in a number of tweets. The website has also uploaded a banner that displays the message: “Please note: In less than 21 hours, the English Wikipedia will be blacked out globally to protest SOPA and PIPA.”
The bills have attracted fierce opposition from many in the technology industry. The New York Times Blog reports that “opponents say several of the provisions in the legislation, including those that may force search engines and Internet service providers to block access to Web sites that offer or link to copyrighted material, would stifle innovation, enable censorship and tamper with the livelihood of businesses on the Internet.”
According to Wales, the English Wikipedia receives approximately 25 million visitors every day. Wikipedia‘s decision means that rather than those millions of visitors seeing the volume of knowledge available, they will be met with a screen explaining the company‘s stance on the bill and information on how to take action against SOPA. Wales has also said that if passed, the bills could censor what information and links various websites will be allowed to publish.
Wikipedia will be joined by other websites Reddit and BoingBoing in shutting down their sites on Wednesday. Other websites, that will not be blacking out their sites like WordPress, will be supplying users with a widget that will add a banner to their websites showing support for the protest.
Late last week, the authors of both SOPA and the Protect IP Act announced they would be removing the DNS blocking provisions from both bills, however the tech community has warned that interfering with DNS would have catastrophic consequences for the stability and security of the Internet. DNS serves as a phone book for the Internet by translating human-friendly computer hostnames into IP addresses. However, many have expressed that this isn’t a good enough.
Jimmy Wales continues to use Twitter to call to action for community members to support the protest and express their views.
What do you think about the action Wikipedia and other websites are taking?
Other source: Mashable
