• Los Angeles Times, Wednesday, January 18, 2012 12:02 PM

Despite some conspicuous holdouts, a coalition of top Web sites went “black” on Wednesday in protest of proposed anti-piracy legislation. “Visitors to English-language pages on Wikipedia, regularly ranked as one of the five most popular sites on the Internet, with an estimated 2.7 billion monthly pageviews in the U.S., instead found only a headline stating ‘Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

Explaining that the proposed SOPA and PIPA anti-piracy bills “could fatally damage the free and open Internet," the message said Wikipedia would be blacked out for 24 hours and asked visitors to contact their congressional representatives, providing a search box to look them up by Zip code.

“Other sites that shut down and displayed similar language included classified listings site Craigslist and technology blog BoingBoing, while a note on the social news website Reddit said it would begin its blackout at 8 a.m. Eastern time.” According to SOPAStrike.com, hundreds of other Web sites were also scheduled to go dark. Google, for its part, didn't shut down but blacked out the logo on its home page and featured a message that said "Tell Congress: Please don't censor the Web!"

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