Black World Wide Web protest

On February 1, 1996, U.S. Congress passed the Telecommunications Act, a telecommunications reform bill containing the Communications Decency Act. Timed to coincide with President Bill Clinton's signing of the bill on February 8, 1996, a large number of web sites had their background color turned to black for 48 hours to protest the Communications Decency Act's curtailment of free speech. The Turn the Web Black protest, also called Black Thursday, was led by the Voters Telecommunications Watch and paralleled the Blue Ribbon Online Free Speech Campaign run by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Thousands of websites, including a number of major ones, joined in the protest. The campaign was noted by major media such as the CNN, TIME magazine and The New York Times.

The Communications Decency Act which gave rise to the protest was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court on June 26, 1997.

See also

• Protests against SOPA and PIPA, also undertaken to oppose a proposed law.
• Internet activism

References

• Collings, Anthony (February 7, 1996). Home pages to go black in protest. CNN
• Lewis, Peter H. (February 8, 1996). Protest, Cyberspace-Style, for New Law. New York Times
• Dibbell, Julian (May 1996). Town Criers for the Net. Wired Magazine, Issue 4.05.
• Mitchell, Dan (February 8, 1997). "Remembering the Great Web Blackout". Wired. http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1997/02/1947. Retrieved 2010-05-15. 

External links

• Initial announcement from Center for Democracy and Technology, retrieved from the Internet Archive
• Copy of Yahoo! homepage on xarch
• Too Little, Too Late by Joel Snyder
• Rant on the Occasion of the Signing of the Communications Decency Act by Howard Rheingold
• How Many Sites Went Dark?: An Educated Guess by Michael A. Norwick, retrieved from the Internet Archive