Free Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists, and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet by and David Moon Patrick Ruffini David Segal

Google, Huffington Post, AOL placed a full-page ad in the New York Times about SOPA.
7. The Blackout
Patrick Ruffini
    The idea of an Internet blackout was first seriously floated in a CNET story on December 29th. And it was one of the industry’s leading lobbyists, Markham Erickson, who was quoted in the story, lending added credibility to the report.
    January 18th was not initially blackout day. It was actually conceived as the day SOPA opponents would get the hearing they were denied by Lamar Smith two months earlier.
Tiffiniy Cheng
    Many Wikipedia users were individually interested in participating in a blackout, and we got the support of the Wikimedia Foundation, but we were told that the decision for Wikipedia to participate in the blackout would require a community-wide conversation and decision-making process. We followed their advice and posted the idea of Wikipedia blacking out on the Village pump section of Wikipedia, where active users congregate to discuss meta-concerns about the site. We crossed our fingers.
Zoe Lofgren
    I had talked a lot about melting the phone lines, and using the Internet’s communication power to impact Congress. Now, Internet leaders emerged, and the idea of a blackout was considered. A group of sites decided to participate. Along with others, I began to lobby tech leaders to try to increase the size and effectiveness of the blackout. On Monday, January 16th Craigslist jumped the gun and used its platform to sound the alarm about SOPA. I emailed Craig Newmark to thank him and then emailed others in the tech world to urge that they join the cause. I was later told that in the two weeks prior to mid-January, SOPA was the number one news topic for Americans under age 30. Most Americans over age 30 had never heard of it.
Patrick Ruffini
    Monday, January 9th saw a small burst of Hill activity, with Darrell Issa’s office announcing a hearing before the full Government Oversight Committee on the DNS blocking provisions in SOPA. The hearing would gather some of the most influential anti-SOPA voices from the business community: Union Square Ventures’ Brad Burnham, Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier, and reddit’s irrepressible co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Reddit’s involvement in the hearing is what turned the blackout from a source of speculation into reality. The day after the hearing was announced, reddit posted about their plans to their blog. “Stopped they must be; on this all depends,” was the title. On January 18th, reddit.com would shut down from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., and in part given over to a live-stream of Issa’s hearing.
Elizabeth Stark
    As anger on the Internet rose, the ever-energetic reddit community decided to fight back. How? Shut down the site for an entire day. The Wikipedia community then decided to follow suit. As did Mozilla, Google, Tumblr, I Can Haz Cheeseburger, and many, many more. All in all, over eighteen million people took action. Hell, even my mom told me that she “voted” for “privacy” (not quite Mom, but thanks for the support!).
Tiffiniy Cheng
    The blackout was still days away, but things were already snowballing out of control. Ultimately, more than one hundred fifteen thousand sites pledged to blackout their sites or prominently display the FFTF widget for 24 hours. This included four of America’s top ten sites by traffic—Craigslist, Wikipedia, Google, and eBay—and 13 top 100 sites. Wordpress (used by over 16% of the top million websites) and Wikipedia blacked out entirely, as did reddit and Craigslist (which to date maintains a victory link on every housing, job, and “for sale” search result). Other major sites like Google, Amazon, Pinterest, and Flickr blocked out their logos and/or displayed links to take public action.
Nicole Powers
    Reading the tweets that bore the #SOPA hashtag that swarmed within our stream, it rapidly became apparent that this legislation would have a chilling effect on sites such as SuicideGirls, which incorporate