Happy Internet Freedom Day [January 18th]
This is the first anniversary of the day the Internet went dark.
All kinds of big powerful important websites went dark to protest two dreadful bits of American legislation, SOPA and PIPA. Amazingly, it worked, and the laws were withdrawn.
It wasn’t just American websites. The Internet doesn’t stop at any border, so web sites around the world went dark in solidarity.
And it wasn’t just big organizations like Wikipedia and EFF or big commercial sites like Cheeseburger or Tumblr.
Plenty of ordinary people made their blogs go dark too. And I have to tell you, it’s a lot harder for us little people who have to figure out the tech to make our blogs go dark (and then turn them on again afterward!) Free Press has a petition Declaration of Internet Freedom petition for Americans.
A lot of the big organizations like the EFF are putting on celebretory events today. But many of us ordinary people scattered around the globe will be celebrating the way we do every day… by trying to keep the Internet free and open, engaging in citizen journalism, sharing, blogging, denting, tweeting, tumbling…
Aaron Swartz was one of the people leading that fight against SOPA, because Aaron knew how important it was that the Internet remain free. But now he’s dead, the rest of us have to pick up the slack.
Image Credits
Aaron Swartz photo by (creativecommoners (Fred Benenson) released under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) License
Wikipedia is commercial?
r siddharth
January 18, 2013 at 10:48 am
Whoops. No, you’re right, Wikipedia is a big powerful organization, but it isn’t commercial… it’s corrected now, thanks.
Laurel L. Russwurm
January 18, 2013 at 12:47 pm