Even though such an approach may have plenty of support, especially in our communities, I wonder if it wouldn't turn off non-technical moderates in a much bigger way.
But the timeline won't be "1. Internet blackout 2. SOPA defeated 3. Congress wipes out the entire computer industry next year". What this does is put them on the board, with all that implies, it's not a suicide move.
But then, the whole point of SOPA is that they are on the board whether they want to be or not, and while they are flattering themselves with their moral purity and pretending they aren't players, all the other players are checkmating them. What this move would change is not the nature of the game, merely the other player's perceptions of the power of the computer industry players.
I suspect that it is effectively inevitable this blackout will occur. It will work. And then we'll have a couple of years of breathing room to work with before the computer industry is coopted and they become part of the machine.
(Sidenote: Note barrkel said would be perceived as, not is. Not the same thing.)
(disclaimer, I'm neither a communicant nor a native speaker; but you get the idea, there's a way to spin the black screen explanation in such a way that it's hard to counter-spin).
The problem with some of these things is, after a while, a universal assumption is developed: the assumption that people must know what you're talking about now.
Ask anyone about SOPA and they might now and be concerned, they might not. Ask someone about the act that has the real possibility of infringing on civil liberties in the name of corporate power, and you might get an open ear. You might not, or you might find someone who actually knows it but not by name.
It's like any *-gate scandal. Until it's historical fact, where you learn about it in reverse (what happened, to how it happened), you're not going to know about it unless you followed it from the start or read up.
Of course, the solution is to raise awareness as best you can, and educate people. Write to a tech blog or site and you're preaching to the choir; do that, or something more drastic, on a site focussed on an entirely unrelated demographic, and you might just get a few more people on your side. If you're Google or Facebook, then this could be the best gauge of consumer influence you can get.
I hate to be the one to tell you this, but the attempt happened a long time ago, and it was completely successful.
There is also precedent for something like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_World_Wide_Web_protest
So I think that example is irrelevant in almost every way.
(As to whether congress was taken over by industry; of course I agree with you. I'm not in favour of SOPA, after all. I'm just wargaming the potential scenario of a protest like this today.)
In that sense, any industry going on strike could be perceived in the same way.
As distinct from SOPA itself, which is an attempted takeover of the democratic process by industry.
The only difference from business as usual is that this time, Big Media picked a fight with people who can and will fight back. Hopefully in doing so, they have undermined their lobbying efforts irretrievably and will never regain the undue influence over legal policy they seem to have drummed up in recent years.
That pretty much sums up SOPA and PIPA too.