Battle for the Internet’s Soul: Google, Wikipedia Stage SOPA Protest

Ben Huh is fired up.

The 33-year-old Internet entrepreneur, who oversees a popular Seattle-based network of cat-heavy comedy blogs known as Cheezburger, is hours away from the biggest day of direct action in his life.

On Wednesday, Huh’s sites, to be joined by Google, Reddit, Wikipedia, WordPress, MoveOn.org, and hundreds more, will participate in an online protest—a strike, no less—that aims to call attention to two bills snaking their way through Capitol Hill.

Some sites will shut down. Others will black out, redirecting users to a landing page with resources to learn more about the bills and contact an elected representative. Google, for its part, smacked a big black bar over its logo on the U.S. homepage.

By doing so, the participating websites hope to send a clear message to the millions of users who rely on them every day. “We want them to understand how this could impact their rights and free speech, and how this is going to kill jobs in one of the few bright spots on the economy, which is the Internet,” Huh explained to me excitedly over the phone from his Seattle office on Tuesday afternoon. “And we want them to call their senators and tell them to vote no on PIPA.”

The bills at the heart of the protest, the Protect IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), have raised the ire of the tech community for what’s being criticized as their broad, irresponsible language written, opponents say, by politicians hoping to please deep-pocketed copyright holders.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) initially introduced the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate in May 2011, which would give the Justice Department the power to take down copyright-infringing websites. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) then followed that up with SOPA on Oct. 26, 2011, for the House, also introducing sweeping anti-piracy legislation intended to empower the U.S. Department of Justice—-and copyright holders-—to fully crack down on websites that are suspected of hosting their copyrighted material.

The two bills’ various provisions, however, have since become lightning rods for critics who claim they ultimately would provide the tools for corporations to censor the Web. “Like many businesses, entrepreneurs and web users, we oppose these bills because there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking American companies to censor the Internet,” Google said in its statement opposing the legislation.

Gizmodo provides an example: “If Warner Bros., for example, says that a site in Italy is [illegally sharing] a copy of The Dark Knight, the studio could demand that Google remove that site from its search results, that PayPal no longer accept payments to or from that site, that ad services pull all ads and finances from it, and—most dangerously—that the site’s ISP prevent people from even going there,” the tech blog explains. A full-on blackout.

Responding to criticism of SOPA, and news that it’s been shelved until next month, Smith reiterated his commitment to the bill in a statement Tuesday. “To enact legislation that protects consumers, businesses and jobs from foreign thieves who steal America’s intellectual property, we will continue to bring together industry representatives and members to find ways to combat online piracy,” he said. “I am committed to continuing to work with my colleagues in the House and Senate to send a bipartisan bill to the White House that saves American jobs and protects intellectual property.”

Still, if opponents of the bills are to be believed, SOPA and PIPA would, essentially, threaten the existence of the Internet as we know it, which makes this fight a battle for its soul. And so the fight is on—with stakes far higher than a comedy guy like Cheezburger’s Huh can laugh at.

“We actually try and stay out of politics,” Huh said of life at his company, a network of humor sites that attracts upward of 17 million monthly readers, in search of far more puppies than policy.

“Surprisingly, people don’t like politics mixed with their humor,” he said. “We try to make sure we don’t sour their daily five minutes of happiness by throwing politics in there.”

So what changed? “The severity of the threat,” said Huh. “It was very clear that as this legislation started coming to light that this is going to undermine the very foundation of how the communal Web works.”