SOPA or Stop Online Piracy Act was introduced in the United States House of Representative on October 26, 2011. Since then it has been causing numerous controversy over whether or not the government has the right to monitor websites based on the basis of copyright infringement. Many opponents claim that it violates the First Amendment and that internet censorship will cripple the internet and will threaten other methods of free speech. I will not go into the details of the act anymore because it is quite complicated and does not really have to do anything with marketing. In any case if you want to read more about it and not have to skim numerous newspaper articles you can find an extensive article on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is one of the many companies who is protesting the SOPA act. Today they blacked out their entire site and one could not access any documents as a way to show what would happen if SOPA was passed.
So where does marketing come in? Well, as you may already know google is also one of the companies protesting the SOPA act. A complete black out will probably not occur because the amount of revenue they get from showing adds everyday is too substantial for them to block their entire site however if this legislation continues to be discussed it may be possible. If google does decide to shut down its servers for one day sure business will lose in gaining possible customers, but the amount would not be substantial. If the law truly did get passed, big websites such as youtube may face a challenge. Many companies use youtube as their means of advertisement. Often when watching a video a commercial pops up beforehand. These businesses that advertise through youtube will need to come up with a new means of advertising their product. The problem arises when other means are two expensive and the company may not have enough money to run any other sort of advertising campaign that is not based on the internet. If this occurs these companies will slowly lose their user base.
Passing a law like this would not be any different than what the North Koreans do when they sensor their internet sites. Furthermore, not only would businesses suffer, but consumers as well, and the whole population that uses the internet would definitely not react in a nice way.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/18/sopa-blackout-protest-makes-history