Millions more joined in around the web, on Wikipedia, Mozilla via EFF and so on

Jan 19, 2012 15:21 GMT  ·  By

The internet banded together yesterday to protest the SOPA and PIPA bills that threaten to severely undermine the web as we know it. Some sites censored parts of their content, had banners or ribbons, some even went down entirely.

Wikipedia managed to get eight million people interested enough in the matter to look up content info for their elected representatives, though it did it at the expense of 162 million people not being able to access the site.

Google ran a simple but effective form of protest, it censored its logo on the homepage and the search results page. It also ran a link to a petition to ask the US Congress to drop the two laws. Reddit, Mozilla, WordPress, Tumblr and countless other sites joined in.

The results have been quite impressive, already tens of congressmen have announced that they are no longer supporting the bills or have quietly removed their support. It's not a home run yet, but it's an important win.

The response from Congress is to be expected since 4.5 million people signed the Google petition alone and the figure was last updated at 4:30pm ET. Many more have signed it after that, that's a lot of votes and if there's one thing that politicians care more about than campaign money, from lobbyists, it's votes.

The petition is still available and people can still sign it, though, without the link from the Google homepage, a lot less people are going to find it or find out about it.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is also counting more than one million messages sent to Congress via its online tool. Around the web, others are reporting similar numbers, from hundreds of thousands to millions of people getting involved.