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Comment by hessenwolf | Hacker News Reader

People might be kinda pissed if google blacks out. There are a lot of urgent services that use google. If just one person can't identify the snake that bit them on that day...

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Blacking out completely is too extreme. I would say a better approach is to put a full-page interstitial ad up over all of these sites with phone numbers to call, and a 30 second timer before you can use the service - be it Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, HN, all the things. Let users get to the service but only after 30 seconds of looking at the phone numbers of US representatives offices, and a message that if SOPA passes, these sites will be gone for good.

That would the most plausible approach Google, Facebook, Twitter and other major sites could take if they were to black out. However, such blackout were to happen, should be restricted to US only. And, Google probably would not want to black out Google Apps. I guess that would infuriate a lot of paying customers.

Exactly, i thought the same thing. That would be the the ideal way of making this work. Because you let your users know about what's going on (if it were google, a number of them would search about sopa to learn more), and let them also coordinate their actions.

This could be a good use for a new Google doodle. Some kind of black anti-SOPA banner that includes the Google logo, maybe?

It has the double benefit of wide front-page exposure along with not requiring a complete break from Google's traditional UX.

Um...use Bing.

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