Hacking group Anonymous have now sent Sony a message in the form of a video regarding the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) bill. This comes just a week after reports of a SOPA-style court order for India's ISPs to block some of the world's largest file-sharing sites including BitTorrent, Megaupload and more. Shortly following, GoDaddy announced their support for SOPA resulting in thousands of domain owners prompting to leave the registrar, including giant networks such as Wikipedia and Cheezeburger which consists of over 1000 domains alone. To deal with the large volume of domain transfers, GoDaddy began blocking (and in some cases delaying) them, which is against the ICANN rules. Finally, GoDaddy realized that SOPA is far too broad and not beneficial to tech-savvy sites due to the possibility of rampant abuse by corporations, and have redacted their stance on supporting SOPA. Also Nintendo, Electronic Arts and Sony Electronics - some of the largest video game companies in the world - have all pulled their support for an online bill that could encourage censorship online, according to an updated list of supporters of the bill.



The Electronic Frontier Foundation describes SOPA as the 'blacklist bill' because it would 'allow the U.S. government and private corporations to create a blacklist of censored websites, and cut many more off from their ad networks and payment providers.' That means the Attorney General would have the power to cut off select websites from search engines like Google. It could also cut off advertisers and payment processors like Visa from the sites. The Attorney General could essentially kill all of a site's traffic and revenue in a matter of days. SOPA only allows targeted sites five days to submit an appeal. That doesn't leave much time for them to defend themselves before losing their site and their revenue altogether.

No doubt this shouldn't be allowed. That's a lot of reach for the small group at the top. It could be like six people pulling all the strings from the top. Look at Rupert Murdock, he controls so much of the media. One guy shouldn't have that much power. He's international. His interests are broadcasted world wide, and he's only one amongst a relatively small group of exorbitantly wealthy people who have a massive stake and influence in global events. What we have are monopolies, global monopolies so large we couldn't even see them because they themselves are the landscape. We are stuck chasing a rainbow that makes dependent all who get swept up in the chase while they are shielded by ambiguous acronyms like ESA but in reality hold they hold the reigns of 20 smaller companies that already are massive at first glance. Corporate Capitalism is survival of the fittest. If you lose, you're acquired, liquidated and assimilated into the alpha corporation making it larger, stronger, and more influential. If it's allowed to go on long enough, there will only be one left and I would hate to imagine what it would be capable of. We can't allow this to happen. We can't let a small group of people control such a large chunk of the markets. I'm not saying rich people are bad, I'm sure Bill Gates is a wonderful person but when a company like Microsoft is actually a component in a larger conglomerate, maybe we should send up the red flags because that's a huge amount of stake and influence on a lot of people's lives. It's the difference between looking at the moon the finger pointed at and looking at the Sun when that same finger pointed. (thanks uprotectedsax)