Wikipedia, Google Going Black

I was searching some info using Wikipedia and when the page loaded, saw this (below) and surprised me.

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First thing that came to my mind is what in the world is SOPA and PIPA? Luckily there is a "Learn More" tab at the bottom right side of the banner to ease my search for these 2 acronyms.

Okay, so on the 16^th of January, 2012, the Wikipedia community announced its decision to black out the English language Wikipedia for 24 hours, worldwide, beginning at 05:00 UTC on Wednesday, 18^th of January, 2012. Such decision is an effort to protest against the proposed legislation to stop Internet piracy by the United States Congress.

SOPA, short for Stop Online Piracy Act and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) if pass would allow the Justice Department to seek a court order requiring U.S. search engines to scrub certain results from the sites as one of its antipiracy measures see this and this. 

Gosh! Imagine the horror if both of these bills are passed.

How many times Wikipedia and other online websites have saved your life by helping you in finishing off your assignments? How many times our most errant, absurd, obscure questions are answered with minimal keystrokes on Google?

I don’t know you but I do often wiki and google. Couldn’t imagine what would happen should the bills are passed... It would be devastating to the free and open web!  

This protest will also be joined by Google, the giant search engine (though they didn’t shut down their site but instead covered most of the logo on its U.S. homepage with a black box, and added a link asking users to tell the U.S. Congress “please don’t censor the web”), and thousands of other, mostly smaller websites.  

Two hours later I checked Wikipedia...

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And Google USA site...

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It is for real... ...