Something called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) could radically alter the way we share information and ideas online by empowering the FCC and a few corporations to give us what commentator Elliot Cohen explains would be our version of China’s Internet censorship.

It’s all pretty heady, dense stuff, but then that’s how all the best rights are stripped away.

Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter are all opposed to the idea, so we have corporations fighting other corporations about what freedoms we should have on the Web.

Maybe at some point we should all just leave and start our own Web. It could be like the good old days when there was no Bed Bath and Beyond newsletter I didn’t ask for, back when the porn was not crazy-weird and only computer science majors overshared online. Where have you gone, dancing hampster? We need you now.

— Peter Z. Scheer

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