Responsibility and Protest

Today the Internet collectively joins in protest against SOPA / PIPA. Several major sites that practically hold up the entire Internet on their backs chose to completely blackout their own website or at least censor their logo/website in an attempt to simulate our world without freedom of speech on the Internet. It is very important for these websites to stand up and get people to comprehend the outrageousness of these Internet censorship bills—not only for purely moral principles but also for their own business livelihood’s sake.

“With great power comes great responsibility”

These major websites that are the essence of Internet freedom of speech have the responsibility to fight for that freedom. So it is interesting to see who has the guts to actual shut down their entire business or at least publicly voice their opposition.

I have to admit, now that the blackout is finally taking place, it is a bit underwhelming. The biggest participants are: Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla, WordPress, and FailBlog (and affiliated icanhazcheezburger websites) [see: SopaStrike]. Noticeably absent from the list is Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, and Twitter.

For the most part, three major reasons stand in the way of more sites participating. One, shutting a website that the majority of society depends on everyday can create a lot of inconvenience and anger for users (but that’s the point). Two, putting a website down for only 12 hours will cost them hundreds of thousands, millions, or even billions of dollars (I personally do not know the actual cost, but it is a significant enough loss). And finally, each website has the additional responsibility to maintain political correctness or, in some cases, complete neutrality.

Unfortunately, the reality is all the inconvenience and revenue loss will be much, much more severe if the Internet censorship bills actually manage to be passed. As in…there would basically be no Internet.

While it is understandable that these major sites have to remain neutral in order to keep the integrity of the content they produce or the service they provide, the simple fact still stands: our government is trying to take away our constitutional rights and destroy the entire infrastructure of the Internet. As a business that exists on the Internet, or even just a mere user of the web, everyone has the responsibility to protect our right to uncensored speech and the existent of the Internet as a free, open space.

Several people, including Wikipedia’s own editors, are criticizing Wikipedia for taking such an extreme stance on this political issue when it site and its information is based on the very idea of political neutrality. However, I believe its founder, Jimmy Wales, made a very good counterpoint in tweeting, “The encyclopedia will always be neutral. The community need not be, not when the encyclopedia is threatened.”

Twitter’s CEO, Dick Costollo, added his own opinion on the situation (not directly to Wikipedia’s response, but just generally) with, “Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish.”

But like I said, if shutting down your business for half a day is too costly for you, what will happen when your business gets shut down permanently?

Although, to be fair, Dick Costollo is very clearly against the bills (see the rest of his tweets), and I don’t mind Twitter, specifically, sitting out from the blackout anyways. I think it is important that such a major service for free speech and protest stays open during the blackout so that people’s voices can be heard loud and clear.

Then again, that also makes it all the more imperative that Twitter should blackout and really show the world what a censored Internet sounds like.

In any case, I applaud those who dared to take a stand, and hope everyone else will do their part to oppose SOPA and PIPA in their own ways that they are comfortable with.