This week it seemed like the biggest topic on the Internet and around campus was … the Internet.
Wikipedia was blacked out. The Google logo was blacked out (though Google the site still worked). At Columbia, Bwog took down its site in protest, and both the College Democrats’ and the College Republicans’ Facebook statuses urged their members to call Senators and Representatives to vote against two bills in Congress—an action Wikipedia and Google encouraged and enabled as well. It may have been the largest day of collective action in the Internet’s history.
This informal digital collectivity was up in arms over SOPA, short for the “Stop Online Piracy Act,” and PIPA, short for the “PROTECT I.P. Act,” which is itself short for the utterly contrived “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act.”
I don’t want to get into the substance of the bills, but, essentially, they both seek to stop online piracy while simultaneously threatening free speech online and an open Internet—none of which, it’s safe to say, appeals to most Columbia students. Hence the outbreak, for a day at least, of some Facebook activism.
