If you run into troubles surfing your usual web haunts tomorrow – don’t try to adjust your computer, or router, or browser – it may be the SOPA blackout. Here’s the quick take from the SOPA Strike website…

On January 18th, 2012 the internet is going on strike to stop the web censorship bills in Congress! Now is our moment— we need you to do everything you can, whether you have a website or not.

Here’s a partial list of folks planning to participate (from the SOPA Strike List):

• Google
• WordPress
• Wikipedia
• Internet Archive
• Center for Technology and Democracy
• reddit
• Electronic Frontier Foundation

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a primer on SOPA. The update since I wrote that is that SOPA has been put on ice until outstanding concerns have been addressed. MSNBC reports..

A House subcommittee was slated to prepare the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, for a vote later this month; the Senate had planned a vote on the companion bill, PIPA (The Protect IP Act,) even sooner. Now, it appears both votes will be delayed.

A little more detail indicates that the issue for SOPA may be in the technical details (again from MSNBC)…

Meanwhile, several signs point to SOPA legislation hitting some serious speedbumps. On Saturday, a statement issued by White House cyberczar Howard Schmidt, and other administration technology officials, threw cold water on SOPA’s anti-piracy efforts.

“Our analysis of the DNS filtering provisions in some proposed legislation suggests that they pose a real risk to cybersecurity and yet leave contraband goods and services accessible online,” says the response, referring to SOPA’s proposal to allow law enforcement officials to blacklist Web sites — cut them off from U.S. users — that allegedly encourage piracy. The response, posted at WhiteHouse.gov on Saturday, does not take a position on SOPA, but it cautioned lawmakers that the administration will oppose anti-piracy efforts that might increase censorship.

The White House has also responded to public comments on SOPA…

Right now, Congress is debating a few pieces of legislation concerning the very real issue of online piracy, including the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the PROTECT IP Act and the Online Protection and Digital Enforcement Act (OPEN). We want to take this opportunity to tell you what the Administration will support—and what we will not support. Any effective legislation should reflect a wide range of stakeholders, including everyone from content creators to the engineers that build and maintain the infrastructure of the Internet.
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Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small.
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We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet.
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So, rather than just look at how legislation can be stopped, ask yourself: Where do we go from here? Don’t limit your opinion to what’s the wrong thing to do, ask yourself what’s right. Already, many of members of Congress are asking for public input around the issue. We are paying close attention to those opportunities, as well as to public input to the Administration. The organizer of this petition and a random sample of the signers will be invited to a conference call to discuss this issue further with Administration officials and soon after that, we will host an online event to get more input and answer your questions. Details on that will follow in the coming days.

(For an interesting take on whether or how piracy does hurt America’s economy, check out Tim O’Reilly’s article.)

As mentioned in the primer, it’s an interesting issue because the folks who get the news out generally have some skin in the game so it’s difficult to get a read on the topic that isn’t impassioned. It will be very interesting to see how traditional media cover the blackout tomorrow. It will also be interesting to see what an impact it has on those of us who are online all day, every day.

Finally – if I were a group such as the Minnesota Broadband Task Force, I might look at the blackout as a sneak peek as what might happen if sites were every shut down outside of their own volition. Can we carry on business effectively and efficiently without our regular online tools? (Not just in terms of SOPA and piracy, but a glimpse as the importance of security and redundancy!)