Web Giants Consider 'Nuclear Option' Blackout to Fight SOPA

What would the web be like without Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon.com, PayPal, Wikipedia or any number of other sites that you probably visit every day? That may be a possibility, as web giants begin to consider seriously a blackout of their services in protest of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

Fox News spoke to NetCoalition, a trade association that represents Google, PayPal, Yahoo and Twitter, among others, and Executive Director Markham Erickson confirmed that yes, the so-called “nuclear option” is under consideration. If these companies were to take this route, all of these sites would go completely dark save for a message of opposition to SOPA censorship and instructions on how to contact your local representative.

“This type of thing doesn’t happen because companies typically don’t want to put their users in that position. The difference is that these bills so fundamentally change the way the Internet works. People need to understand the effect this special-interest legislation will have on those who use the Internet,” Erickson explained to Fox News.

What Erickson is really talking about is the more consumer-facing aspects of these businesses, and I doubt that Google would turn off Gmail for business, or that Amazon will shut down EC2. But as the Save Hosting Coalition has pointed out before, SOPA is potentially a danger to the entire cloud industry, and TalkinCloud is going to keep close watch going forward.