January 19 2012: Two bills before  the US Congress, known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House of Representatives, have united, Web leaders like Google, Wikipedia, Facebook , Mozilla and Twitter. They claim the  bills  would censor the Web and impose harmful regulations on  business. saying millions of Internet users and entrepreneurs already oppose SOPA and PIPA. The Senate will begin voting on January 24th.
Wikipedia blanked its English site on January 18 ( illustration );  Google  briefly has blacked out its logo on its homepage and added a link to  document headed:"End piracy, not liberty" ( inset  in illustration, above). Mozilla, (Firefox originator),  redirected traffic from its main English websites for 12 hours to a black page.
The issue is important for the  150 million plus users of Internet in India because the Acts if they become law will see  hundreds of dot com addresses which are controlled from the US, restrict  video downloads, blogs linked to such downloads etc.