In 24 Hours, Your Favorite Websites Will Shut Down

Kiss them goodbye.

, the uber-popular homemade encyclopedia covering just about everything, is so determined to oppose the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) legislation that it is going to shut down the English version of its website for one day starting on January 18, 2012. “Today Wikipedians from around the world have spoken about their opposition to this destructive legislation,” Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, said in a company release. “This is an extraordinary action for our community to take – and while we regret having to prevent the world from having access to Wikipedia for even a second, we simply cannot ignore the fact that SOPA and PIPA endanger free speech both in the United States and abroad, and set a frightening precedent of Internet censorship for the world.” In the 72 hours leading up to this announcement, more than 1,800 Wikipedians “joined together to discuss proposed actions that the community might wish to take against SOPA and PIPA,” the company said in its release on the matter. “This is by far the largest level of participation in a community discussion ever seen on Wikipedia, which illustrates the level of concern that Wikipedians feel about this proposed legislation. The overwhelming majority of participants support community action to encourage greater public action in response to these two bills. Of the proposals considered by Wikipedians, those that would result in a ‘blackout' of the English Wikipedia, in concert with similar blackouts on other websites opposed to SOPA and PIPA, received the strongest support.” According to

, those “other websites” include Reddit and Boing Boing. Cheezburger is reporetedly on board as well. Meanwhile, websites like Google

and Facebook – which strongly oppose SOPA – have yet to declare a day in which a blackout will occur, indicating that they have backed away from the idea now that the White House has announced that it will not support SOPA in its current form. While SOPA's demise is not set in stone, many believe that the legislation no longer has a chance of going through without a massive overhaul. Whether or not that proves to be the case, Google and other large sites may have also backed away in fear of the damage it could do to their brands – and, more significantly, their bottom lines. Wikipedia, for example, receives more than 474 million unique visitors per month, comScore

claims. That makes Wikipedia – and its related projects – the fifth-most popular Web property in the world. As a non-profit organization, the site does not stand to lose very much for going down. In fact, it might actually increase its popularity. For the time being, Wikipedia is the leading site to announce a 24-hour blackout. Thus, all of the media headlines lead with the Wikipedia name. That level of promotion might be worth a single day of reduced traffic. Google, on the other hand, could not really survive a 24-hour blackout. Facebook could not either. The amount of money that would be lost would be insurmountable – not just for one day but for the rest of the company's existence. If Google were to go down, Yahoo!

and Microsoft

would step forward and shove their respective search engines (and other Google-competing features) down the throats of consumers. Inevitably, consumers would take notice. If Google.com suddenly disappeared for a day, there'd be some users that were so frustrated that they would happily switch to Bing. Further, I don't think Mozilla – which recently accepted a check for nearly $300 million to keep Google as Firefox's default search engine – would be too happy with Google if a shutdown were to occur. While you might think that it doesn't matter because Mozilla got paid anyway, can you imagine the backlash from Firefox users who could no longer perform a simple search? Default search engine access is

to a browser's success. Facebook is in a more precarious position. If it were to shutdown, people would move over to its arch rival, Google+. They may also head over to Twitter, which will definitely not be shut down in protest of SOPA. According to

, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo referred to the blackout as a “silly” decision,

, “Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish.” That tweet was in a response to a question by Government 2.0 correspondent Alexander Howard, who

, “@jayrosen_nyu It's not clear if @dickc @finkd or @ericschmidt have the cojones to take users where @davidkarp or @Jimmy_Wales & co have/will.” Howard and Costolo have continued to tweet back and forth on the matter ever since, inspiring Howard to

.