Internet Decency

Since the GoDaddy protests of last December, the seemingly innocuous terms SOPA and PIPA have been on the lips of tech-savvy individuals the world over. The internet piracy bills are both still just propositions at this stage, but it’s their potential that’s lit a fire under companies such as Google and Wikipedia to voice their concerns, and now it seems even President Obama is anti-SOPA (at least, in its current incarnation).

Fresh from their Boycott GoDaddy campaign, news site Reddit are once again at the forefront of the anti-SOPA action, last week announcing plans to “black out” their site on January 18th in protest of the bill. The blackout, which as the name suggests, would see visitors to reddit.com faced with a black screen, has now picked up the support of Wikipedia who will also set their English-version site to black tomorrow.

140-Character Retort

In something of a surprise posting though, when broached on whether Twitter would consider doing likewise, CEO Dick Costolo tweeted “That’s just silly. Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish.” Media mogul Rupert Murdoch went one further on the subject, blasting President Obama as siding with his “Silicon Valley paymasters” and branding Google a “Piracy leader”.

With social media and the wider internet now so firmly imbedded in our everyday lives, it was only a matter of time before such issues arose in Governments minds. Now that the debate has been well and truly entered into, 2012 could be the year that the internet grew up only to find itself under house-arrest.