Google confirmed that 4.5 million people added their names to the company's anti-SOPA petition today.The petition, which was available via a link from Google's homepage, states that although fighting online piracy is important, the plan of attack described in the SOPA and PIPA bills would be ineffective.
The search engine frequently delights users by toying with its homepage logo, but on Wednesday it did something it had never done before: it blocked out its logo completely.
A link below the blackout read "Tell Congress: Please don't censor the web!" and lead to a page with the petition.
I"Wikipedia" goes into offline in protest against censorship on the Web
January 18, 2012 some of the largest Internet resources, including English-language "Wikipedia", suspended its work to protest against the anti-piracy bill SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), which is pending in the lower house of U.S. Congress. In this way, they want to pay attention to its millions of visitors that the law significantly complicate the life of the Internet community worldwide.
On the eve of November 15, Internet giants such as Google , Facebook , Twitter , eBay, Mozilla, Yahoo, AOL, LinkedIn and Zynga sent to both houses of U.S. Congress a letter demanding "to find other ways to deal with foreign sites of Offenders." As a result of these actions on the bill began to talk loudly and, more importantly, began to bind it firmly with attempts to censor the Internet.
Customers interested in preserving Internet freedom and the failure of SOPA, felt strong support from the network of corporations. With this in late December, they managed to win over the biggest online registrar GoDaddy. The company first announced support for SOPA and its involvement in its development, but received an unexpected and painful answer is: users have declared a boycott of her and began to transfer their domains under the control of other registrars.
This move, supported not only by simple users with their home pages, but also large companies that own hundreds of corporate domain, was a complete surprise to GoDaddy. The company almost immediately announced that refuses to support the ill-fated bill. In parallel with this company was to call customers turned away from questions about the chances of their return. However, it was not enough (users quickly realized that "refusal to support" does not mean 'willingness to resist "), and in the end GoDaddy gave up , joining the ranks of the opponents of the bill.
Source:lenta.ru