Internet Blackout - Supporting Online Job Creation

The Internet blackout we all experienced yesterday was a final push towards getting our government to stop two big bills that would 'break' our internet. SOPA and PIPA have essentially been killed by the enormous revolt the internet community has taken against the legislation. As of two days ago, there were only 5 senators that were publicly against PIPA. PIPA is a bill relating to IP address control that was being pushed in the Senate. After yesterday's upheaval, there are 35 Senators that are publicly going against this legislation. It just takes 41 votes against this bill. SOPA, the house of representatives partner bill to PIPA has essentially been shelved.

How did this happen? Well, it got to the point where the public simply didn't know enough about these bills. Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, and many other popular online websites blacked their sites out in protest. For sites like Reddit, I can hardly see this doing much good, as all and any Redditors were bound to have seen posts about SOPA and PIPA on the front pages for months. Wikipedia might have had the biggest impact out of all of them. Every single Wiki page was blacked out after a half a second of loading time. "Imagine a world without free knowledge" was written across a black layer and there were links to contact your congressmen and representatives. Most anti-SOPA and anti-PIPA enthusiasts were disappointed with Google's half hearted attempt. They simply added a blackout doodle to their home page. If Google would have blacked out every search result, I can guarantee you thousands of frustrated people would have emailed and called their congressmen. We were all hoping for such an epic upheaval by Google, and were, of course, disappointed.

But, you should be asking yourself, how does this relate to Jobs? Well, the internet has long been the last open 'frontier', if you will, for the free market. There are thousand of people who are self employed because of their internet success. The entrepreneur opportunities the internet can offer are so great that many people are implementing product ideas on e-commerce stores instead of a mainstream storefront. The startup cost is less and the risk as far, far less.

Not to mention, both legislation is extremely unconstitutional and morally wrong.

Another note on the geeky side, if the government was allowed to censor the web, online security would collapse. The way the government would go about censoring the web would lead to open gaps and loopholes that hackers could easily exploit. It would, essentially, 'break' the internet.

On a final note, the man who wrote up this bill, U.S. Congressman Lamar Smith is actually violating the legislation he is trying to pass. That's right folks, Lamar doesn't even know what type of legislation he is passing. He saw $94 million in lobbying money and probably didn't think twice. How exactly is he violating this? His website is using a background that is under a common creative licensee which means he is required to give credit to the photographer in his website. Which he doesn't. He is actually using copyrighted material illegally on his own website that is supporting an Anti-Piracy law.

$94 million from companies that want to be able to sue you for singing along to karaoke and putting it on YouTube. Justin Bieber could face 5 years in prison because of music videos he made when he was 10. In face, under this laws, people like Justin Bieber could have never become who they are. Not that I would miss not having Bieber around, but in all seriousness, he would have been a nobody his whole life.

Save e-commerce, entrepreneurship, and the free market and call your Representatives!

The ANTI SOPA argument that appeared on The Oatmeal here

Contact your Senator and Representative here