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The uber popular web news and aggregation site Reddit.com is planning to blackout their site next Wednesday January 18 in opposition of Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act (better known as SOPA). And you won’t believe whose supporting the efforts to block this controversial bill: The likes of Ron Paul, Nancy Pelosi and Michele Bachmann just to name a few. Talk about a bipartisan issue!
Wikipedia founder James Wales has proposed a similar blackout while Google, Yahoo, AOL and other major Web companies continue to condemn SOPA.
The Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act would essentially allow U.S. law enforcement and copyright holders to fight online trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property and counterfeit goods by barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators such as PayPal from conducting business with such companies. SOPA would also criminalize unauthorized streaming video websites. ISPs can ultimately be held liable, website domains can be seized. The likes of YouTube, eBay and other major websites could find themselves in violation of such an act should it become law.
The online gambling industry and Gambling911.com have been following the SOPA developments closely. After all, it is the multi-billion dollar Web gambling sector that finds itself front and center of the domain seizure battle. Operating legally in jurisdictions where they are based, a number of popular websites had their domain names seized in 2011, including PokerStars.com, the world’s largest Internet poker site and ranking as the 3,759th most visited website on the Net according to Alexa (this is without US traffic now that the site domain is blocked in the US). As a result of these actions, much of the industry has switched over to a .EU and .AG (Antigua) extension. The website Bovada (formerly Bodog.com) has even moved to a .LV (Latvia).
From the Washington Post:
On his user talk page, Wales revisited the idea of taking Wikipedia offline in protest, a tactic that the online encyclopedia has used in the past against an Italian privacy law. Wales has put the decision to the Wikipedia community.
“I’m all in favor of it,” he wrote on his personal talk page on the site. “[And] I think it would be great if we could act quickly to coordinate with Reddit. I’d like to talk to our government affairs advisor to see if they agree on this as useful timing, but assuming that’s a greenlight, I think that matching what Reddit does (but in our own way of course) per the emerging consensus on how to do it, is a good idea.” He asked that the community take a vote on whether to protest or not, and soon.
“[We] don’t have the luxury of time that we usually have, in terms of negotiating with each other for weeks about what’s exactly the best possible thing to do,” he wrote.
Sadly, the Internet gambling community as a whole has not focused on SOPA as should be warranted.
“It is a bit surprising that, with all the online gambling sector has been through, industry media has virtually ignored SOPA,” commented Chris Costigan, founder of the Gambling911.com website.
FlopTurnRiver.com is one of the few. They featured a piece this week we encourage G911 readers to look at here.
- Alejandro Botticelli, Gambling911.com
