SOPA and PIPA were dropped by Congress- at least for now and at least in their present forms.Because of all of you who called your Senators and Congressmen and Women, because of all your support in the online protests, because of you re-blogging the important information, because of you who spread the word on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus and on ActiveRain, because of you taking a stand.... we were able to get enough votes to get the two bills canceled.
This was the largest protest in the history of the Internet.
On January 18th over 13 Million of us- people- regular people- dialed those phones, put our fingers to those keyboards and made sure the the switchboard in Washington DC was lit up!
This was a game changer... our VOICES made a difference on January 18th!
Over 10,000,000 signatures
Over 3,000,000 emails sent
Over 115,000 sites participated in the strike
But even more important than that we set an example to the world as there were over one billion people from around the world watching this go down here.
If you ever felt like your vote did not count, that your voice is drowned out by those who have more power than you or more influence than you, if you have ever felt like there is no use to speak up anymore... just let this sink in. Let this really sink in.
This might have just been a huge game changer in our world today for public interest and one that is not going to be taken for 'friendly' from those in power. Because we have power on the Internet and we need to keep it that way. That of course is a scary thing for the governments. Because as Thomas Jefferson said many years ago: The people have the power when government fears the people which is liberty. It is when the people fear the government there is tyranny.
The MPAA who is the lobbying group for the movie studios who created these two bills were very shocked at this outcry and the amazing mobilizing we were able to accomplish so quickly. They were also humbled by our voices.
Guess who is the Chairman of MPAA?? - those of you in real estate know him very well- former Senator Chris Dodd! Isn't he the one that should be in jail for mortgage fraud? He was totally shocked by our voices and how fast we were able to get this out that we are against these two bills. He said, " This was a whole new different game all of a sudden." He said in four decades he has not seen anything as big as this was.
Yes, it is different because now what you say on the house floor is tweeted around the world in seconds. You can no longer run around behind closed doors giving out all your favors.
Thank you to Mozilla, ActiveRain, Google, Wikipedia, Tumblr, Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org, Reddit and so many more of you.
And guess who also was watching this all unfold? The people of China. China was of course censoring even our tweets about the protest and policing the content very closely yet it was being watched and the message was clear. The Chinese were watching and seeing what we would do.
Commentator Liu Qingyan said:
"We should learn something from the way these American Internet companies protested against SOPA and PIPA. A free and democratic society depends on every one of us caring about politics and fighting for our rights. We will not achieve it by avoiding talk about politics."
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