Months in the making, hundreds of thousands of voices heard, the war is finally on! SOPA/PIPA have their day on January 24th, they will either be passed or delayed. In order to stop this catastrophe from happening, the big names have joined hands ignoring their traffic and business and stand against a single big threat. January 18th was announced as a strike against SOPA by Reddit, it was supposed to be the day when major websites were going to go dark and display words against SOPA/PIPA. When it was announced, most of the big sites weren’t sure of making the move. All of a sudden, the entire controlling for of the internet got involved in the strike, companies like Google, Wikipedia, WordPress, Reddit, Mozilla, Minecraft, Tumblr are JUST a few of them.
I was shocked when I opened up Wikipedia this morning to see this gorgeous screen:
Google did its part too:
This is what it all comes down to. All of the internet’s big names, no matter how different they may be, stand together against this unjust law. Reddit and Google have nothing in common, 4chan and WordPress don’t come together on any front, but here everything is forgotten and only one thing is in mind, stopping SOPA/PIPA from happening. And this is just the beginning, a lot of teachers tweeted about Wikipedia being down so that their students could finish their projects earlier. Twitter is filled with hashtags like #stopsopa and #sopastrike in the thousands by today!
Innovation will not stay quiet anymore, people even designed plugins for WordPress to let bloggers install them and have their sites blacked out. Apart from the hundreds of big and notable names joining in, thousands of blogs and websites have taken part as well. Now the big question is, will this stop SOPA? There is no clear answer, the bill can still pass because the powers behind it surpass the power of the internet. CBS, Disney, NBC, ESPN, these are just some of the names supporting SOPA/PIPA. We will keep you updated on the strike and whatever happens on January 24th.