SOPA Opponents Unite and Consider Online Blackout

The heat is rising over the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act, commonly known as SOPA. The legislation would enable the U.S. Department of Justice to monitor and enforce copyright infringements occurring on the Internet. Opponents say that the act is a first amendment violation and would cripple the Internet.

Over the Christmas holiday 37,000 domains left GoDaddy because of the company’s support of the legislation. GoDaddy is battling other problems as it faces a flurry of accusations that it is improperly blocking domain transfer requests to CheapName.

Talks regarding SOPA are on hold until Congress reconvenes, but major Internet companies have continued their work to discourage the legislation. ExtremeTech cited Markham Erickson, head of the NetCoalition trade association, who said that big name sites like Amazon, Yahoo!, eBay and Google have even discussed such extreme measures as a “nuclear-option” in which the companies would simultaneously go dark in protest.

While participants of a blackout risk backlash from users, ExtremeTech makes a point that there is safety in numbers. The sites would also make it well-known why the discontinuation of service has occurred in order to direct anger to the intended source. ExtremeTech lists companies who have voiced opposition against SOPA as AOL (NYSE:AOL), eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY), Etsy, Facebook, foursquare, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), IAC (NASDAQ:IACI), LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD), Mozilla, Open DNS, PayPal, Twitter, Wikipedia Foundation, Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO) and Zynga Game Network (NASDAQ:ZNGA).