Winning the Internet

SOPA: The Internet strikes back

After a great run, the Winning the Internet blog has been retired. However, you can still keep in touch with New Media Mentors here.






On January 18th we’re standing in solidarity with thousands of other sites and individuals to protest SOPA. This action is rather unique because it has unified organizations across the political spectrum and caused technology companies simply providing a service to interrupt that service to tell their users about the dangers of this bill. Most of the participants here have sat on the sidelines, even through important debates like the FCC ruling on net neutrality and debating wireless spectrum.

I’m probably not going to provide any insight about this fight that you haven’t already read, so we’ll stick with what we do best here. I wanted to share a few pieces that I felt made the case for joining the protest and/or articulated the issue in an interesting way.

Clay Johnson has been talking about a problem in the tech community for a number of weeks, people largely don’t understand how Congress works. You can check out his argument as it develops by paging through his blog. But if you have time on your hands on January 18th, I’d highly recommend this day of virtual training he has planned.

Micah Sifry summarizes the history of these bills and the argument against them at Personal Democracy Forum.

Tim O’Reilly writes a public piece on his Google+ account about SOPA, the influence of lobbyists and a technology perspective on it all.

And of course if you haven’t seen this video yet it’s worth a few minutes of your time to watch and share.

There’s a lot of places you can take action, so make your voice heard.

About Raven Brooks

Executive director of Netroots Foundation and Netroots Nation.






Comments are closed.