The Hill News

With all due respect, the golden-penned Peggy Noonan said it first, but I hope she doesn’t mind that I borrow her iconic phrase because I think we may have just had another revolution. It’s politics of a different sort this time, though - or maybe it’s not politics at all.  Unlike the big-haired, big-everything 80s, (I know. I was there and my hair was big) in 2012 you have bitter, polarized Republicans and Democrats â€" and then you have the Internet. If any of that was in doubt, on January 18, 2012, the Internet officially arrived, albeit with the weirdest terms ever â€" SOPA and PIPA - bills that may be dissected and discussed and obsessed over for years to come as the acronyms that changed everything.

Perhaps you saw it. Perhaps you participated; clicked through Google’s censorship Doodle or found that Wikipedia was dark and clicked to find out more instead of being annoyed you might have to actually go to the library, whatever that is. Maybe you w! ent to Craigslist to look for used IKEA furniture in suburban Chicago only to find SOPA and PIPA all over the page and the next thing you knew, you were calling your Senator for the first time in your life. Maybe you were standing in the checkout line at a Walgreens in Atlanta and heard the checkout guy explaining to the stock clerk that SOPA is a threat to Internet freedom.

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