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Why Google And Facebook Need To Go Dark To Protest SOPA

forbes.com

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Re: Why Google And Facebook Need To Go Dark To Protest SOPA

#11

Post by apalmblad »

sheeps wrote: post #6
krschultz wrote: post #5

I don't think Google & Facebook need to go dark to achieve this. Going dark is not something either company would do - the cost is enormous and it would draw real ire from politicians. But Google simply changing it's logo for a day would be enough to magnify the publicity around this issue. That doesn't impact their users or their bottom line, but it gets the job done.

Maybe just a black rectangle in place of the name, with an appropriate link?

Perhaps someone would be interested in writing some embeddable javascript for the smaller guys that, say, puts a black banner and info links across the top of site? [Me, well, I'm Canadian, and feel like it'd come across as more of a stunt]

Re: Why Google And Facebook Need To Go Dark To Protest SOPA

#12

Post by [deleted] »

krschultz wrote: post #5

I don't think Google & Facebook need to go dark to achieve this. Going dark is not something either company would do - the cost is enormous and it would draw real ire from politicians. But Google simply changing it's logo for a day would be enough to magnify the publicity around this issue. That doesn't impact their users or their bottom line, but it gets the job done.

[deleted]

Re: Why Google And Facebook Need To Go Dark To Protest SOPA

#13

Post by oacgnol »

krschultz wrote: post #5

I don't think Google & Facebook need to go dark to achieve this. Going dark is not something either company would do - the cost is enormous and it would draw real ire from politicians. But Google simply changing it's logo for a day would be enough to magnify the publicity around this issue. That doesn't impact their users or their bottom line, but it gets the job done.

Tumblr placed a banner at the top and it generated huge amounts of calls to local reps (I think over 12k?). I could see this happening on a much larger scale should Facebook and Google do the same and all without interrupting service.

Re: Why Google And Facebook Need To Go Dark To Protest SOPA

#14

Post by coderdude »

ericb wrote: post #3

While this would make a statement, somewhere I saw a good point--someone will be googling to see if the snake that bit them was poisonous. Google is now critical infrastructure, like power. If it goes out, people will quite possibly die.

Sounds an awful lot like "too big to fail" rhetoric.

Re: Why Google And Facebook Need To Go Dark To Protest SOPA

#15

Post by methodin »

Google would have a lot more to lose than Facebook. Most of the posts on Facebook are not necessarily links etc... and even if the links were banned it wouldn't have that much of an effect on Facebook itself, other than people getting PO'd that the link they click on are decommissioned. Most people tend to be smart enough to realize this is not Facebook's fault.

Google on the other hand is almost exclusively driven by other content so having a sudden lack thereof would be far more detrimental.

Therefor I would be surely surprised if Facebook did something like this while I could every well see something happening on Google's side - although offsetting the money being poured in support of SOPA to counteract it would also go a long way to help.

Re: Why Google And Facebook Need To Go Dark To Protest SOPA

#16

Post by kamjam »

krschultz wrote: post #5

I don't think Google & Facebook need to go dark to achieve this. Going dark is not something either company would do - the cost is enormous and it would draw real ire from politicians. But Google simply changing it's logo for a day would be enough to magnify the publicity around this issue. That doesn't impact their users or their bottom line, but it gets the job done.

I don't think it needs to completely dark, they would probably lose too much revenue to justify this... but why don't they black out the site with an overlay and a message "this is what would happen if SOPA becomes law, click here to find out more and contact your local member of congress" and then the user can close the message and continue as normal with the site. (This is screaming out for a jquery plugin!)

Obviously you could then just target markets and leave the rest of us free thinking robots to carry on as normal :)

Re: Why Google And Facebook Need To Go Dark To Protest SOPA

#19

Post by iamandrus »

oacgnol wrote: post #13
krschultz wrote: post #5

I don't think Google & Facebook need to go dark to achieve this. Going dark is not something either company would do - the cost is enormous and it would draw real ire from politicians. But Google simply changing it's logo for a day would be enough to magnify the publicity around this issue. That doesn't impact their users or their bottom line, but it gets the job done.

Tumblr placed a banner at the top and it generated huge amounts of calls to local reps (I think over 12k?). I could see this happening on a much larger scale should Facebook and Google do the same and all without interrupting service.

If I remember correctly, over 83k calls.
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