First was the Reddit portal. This weekend he announced that starting at midnight this Tuesday, his page will "turn off". This website of links, recommendations and comments will only publish documentation related to the SOPA law (Stop Online Piracy Act, in English), still under debate in the United States Congress and responsible for an important movement on the Internet in recent months.
Then Wikipedia arrived. Its founder Jimmy Wales announced via Twitter that the Wikimedia Foundation was meeting yesterday to make a decision. Would you turn off the online encyclopedia for the entirety of Wednesday the 18th? It is the sixth most visited portal on the Internet and has 25 million users a day. Its closure in protest of a law still pending in a congressional committee has the potential to make a complaint in the United States go around the world. In the header of their page they have already placed the link to a statement announcing the closure.
“Notice to students! Finish your homework soon. “Wikipedia to shut down against evil law on Wednesday!” The decision was made. On January 18, while legislators listen to internet experts such as Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Redd t, Wikipedia will celebrate his particular mourning for the network. Wales told the newspaper The New York Times that only those users accessing from the US will see the 'blackout' and that it is estimated that it may affect 100 million Internet users. At the moment, they have not decided whether they will also close all pages of the portal in English.
"It will be the first time that Wikipedia in English has led a protest of this magnitude and it is a decision that we have not taken lightly," says the statement on the foundation's page, in which they explain that some 1.800 people have debated in recent days what was the best strategy they could follow against SOPA. On Wednesday, Wikipedia's front page will direct users to articles about the legislation and explain how to get their opinion to legislators charged with approving or rejecting the regulations, a practice adopted by various websites in recent weeks.
“Notice to students! Finish your homework soon. “Wikipedia to shut down against evil law on Wednesday!”
2011 came to an end with the majority of internet companies and creators united in rejection of this legislation, but the unity of these companies has not been maintained when deciding to 'turn off the pages'. There are those who see the closure of Facebook or Twitter, even for a few hours, as the equivalent response to the threat that this law poses to freedom of expression. Dick Costolo, president of Twitter, however, reacted in another direction: “That would be nonsense. Closing a global business in rejection of a country-specific law is absurd,” he wrote on Twitter on Monday afternoon..
Shortly afterwards he would clarify that he had nothing to recriminate against Wikipedia, that he was referring to those who asked him to completely close Twitter and that this article The Guardian, where the controversy broke out, had misinterpreted his message. Jimmy Wales would come to agree with Costolo, stating in an exchange between the two that Twitter should not participate in the closure.
In late 2011, the creators of Google, Yahoo!, LinkedIn and other internet companies signed an open letter in which they regretted that the SOPA and PIPA projects - the Intellectual Property Protection bill being studied by the Senate - require their web pages to monitor the links that their users recommend in case they were breaking the law and "jeopardizing security." on the network by changing its basic structure.” Another 83 engineers and Internet creators wrote a letter to Congress in a clear rejection of the SOPA law: “Censorship of the internet structure will inevitably cause network errors and security problems. “This is true in China, Iran and other countries that censor the Internet,” they stated.
Both regulations have been accused of fracturing the internet, censoring the network, hindering innovation in industries that have traditionally benefited from online freedom and, finally, because they represent too broad an intervention by the government in the rights of citizens.
The symbolic blackout on pages like Wikipedia this Wednesday comes at a time when the SOPA law is stuck in a US congressional committee. The group of legislators who must define the final text before putting it to a vote has not yet agreed. More than one acknowledged during the debate sessions that they are not “experts” on the subject. And the same sections that separate them are the ones that have raised controversy in the internet community.
The objective of these regulations is the closure of internet pages that allow the download of content protected by copyright, violating intellectual property, even if their owners have hosted the domain in the United States but reside abroad. It would therefore expand the powers of the North American courts, which could bring to justice owners of foreign pages that are benefiting financially from content protected in the United States. In another of the sections considered for the text, internet providers would have immunity in the case of blocking network access to innocent users.
The White House, for its part, issued a statement last Friday announcing that he would not support any legislation that “reduces freedom of expression, increases online security risks or harms dynamism and innovation on the Internet.”
The Senate, where PIPA remains pending, could vote on it as early as this week, and if it goes ahead, the House Judiciary Committee could resume talks on SOPA at the same time, albeit with some changes. Hours before the committee announced that it was withdrawing the law to evaluate some sections, its president, Republican Lamar Smith, proposed eliminating one of its most controversial sections. and that forced providers to act as police on the network.