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I wonder if it would also make a difference if Google arranged to censor all of the supporting members of the House and Senate. It shouldn't take long for at le
by hsmyers 15y ago
I wonder if it would also make a difference if Google arranged to censor all of the supporting members of the House and Senate. It shouldn't take long for at least their aides to get the message in a particularly realistic way. For my .02 worth, I'd leave the 'switch' on for good, but I'm old and vindictive :)
- anigbrowl 15y agoI think this would be considerably more effective.
- boredguy8 15y agoWouldn't that run counter to Google's point about how hard / difficult it is to censor specific sites?
- burgerbrain 15y agoSuppose they just blocked access entirely to all publicly known IP blocks used by congress members and buildings? That wouldn't be the same sort of technical challenge as SOPA would pose, but would drive home the point pretty well.
- boredguy8 15y agoThis is an interesting idea, insofar as it falls generally in line with one of the potential effects of SOPA enforcement. But perhaps more interestingly: because people would still have a job to do, they'd use Bing or something else, which would hopefully demonstrate to Washington just how circumventable the legislation is.
- burgerbrain 15y agoQuite so, that's a great point.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- BrandonM 15y agoGoogle owns YouTube and Google+, both of which are sites for user-created content. And besides, the Internet is user-created content, indexed by Google. SOPA would require them to police their index just as much as the more direct user-content sites.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- blhack 15y agoHow does SOPA effect gmail? If somebody sends me a link to copyrighted material, and I view it on gmail.com, is google infringing?
- gkoberger 15y agoIt is possible that Google will someday have to filter all emails for "blacklisted links". I'll try to find a source.
- jeggers5 15y agoTo be honest, I really can't see Google doing that. In a much more likely situation, they would put some kind of banner on Google.com expressing their distaste for SOPA. The same for other big companies like Facebook. I thought what Tumblr did was cool, they managed to get many people calling their local reps. Also, I think we're concentrating too much on the big companies (not that it's really a bad thing). The little ones matter, too. Marshaling them would be somewhat easier due to their lack of hierarchical politics to make every decision. Although you do have the problem of the multitude of people who just access the internet via Facebook's walled garden. They also have no idea what SOPA is/means. So, if we can get the giants of the internet to do something - that's fantastic, but we need to get the smaller blogs/websites on board too.
- snowwrestler 15y agoSure--nothing seizes the moral high ground in a censorship fight like censoring a whole bunch of democratically elected officials.
- morsch 15y agoOf course, this would be a much more heavy-handed approach than what is proposed here for Wikipedia. Turning off a site is a clear message, it's very direct and not manipulative beyond declaring your support either way. Changing the algorithm is more insidious, unless or even if you had a disclaimer on top saying you modified the result to fit your agenda. I think this is comparable to modifying the Wikipedia SOPA article to be non-neutral, which is a terrible idea of course. In the same vein, I don't think blanking Wikipedia can violate NPOV (in its Wikipedia sense), since this policy refers to editorial content: the articles themselves need to be neutral. The concept of NPOV is simply not applicable to the Wikipedia enterprise as a whole.