Some of the Internet’s big guns have banded together and are planning a possible “Blackout Day” to protest the SOPA/PIPA acts that are due for debate in Congress.

With strong support for the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) bills among both the democratic and republic representatives of Congress, the world now fears that the bill could actually come to pass. Just recently, the strongly opposed NDAA bill was signed off by US President Barack Obama, signaling even more protests.

While Obama initially expressed dislike for the NDAA bill, things went the other way and it is now official law. SOPA and PIPA could follow a similar course, and as a result, leading online social networks and e-commerce websites are mulling the idea of a “Blackout Day” to show their lack of support for the bills. While many big corporations have already written official statements of no confidence for the proposed bills, it seems a more drastic form of action may be needed to show how serious the majority of the web feels about the acts coming into effect.

Markham Erickson, head of the NetCoalition trade association says that big names like Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Twitter, and eBay are heavily considering going “black” by posting protest messages to convince users to contact their relevant congressman.

Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, has also started a discussion to decide whether he should shut down the site to show support for the anti-SOPA movement.

A blackout of these major sites would result in a serious blow for the search engine, social networking, e-commerce and information arenas, among many other online services. While the stance could result in a lot of fallout between the companies and their user base, it might be just the thing to get congress to reconsider a total re-write of the proposed bills.

GoDaddy felt the backlash after users found out that the domain registrar was in support of the SOPA and PIPA acts. Just last week, almost 40,000 domains were transferred out to other non-SOPA supporting registrars. We at What’s Hawt are also due to transfer, but are still within a 60-day limit due to a recent registration change made to our domain.

SOPA will go up for debate again on the Senate floor on the 24th of January.

Bradley Wint

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Bradley Wint is the Founder and Executive Editor of What's Hawt. His interests include technology, cars, motorsports, aviation and writing. These varied interests are what inspired him to create this website.