Quote:
Originally Posted by daffy4u
Wasn't the Stop SOPA petition part of successful campaign to get the U.S. government to back off (at least for now)?
I also did a Google search for successful petitions and they do exits. Not that I had heard of any of the issue but for the people who signed the petitions, they won.
I do agree that Google probably won't back down but they might delay the closure to give devs more time to come up with better solutions (or hopefully go open source).
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There are two important differences between SOPA and this:
- SOPA was "defeated" (it keeps coming back) by a concerted effort of individuals contacting their congresspeople and prominent websites "going dark" to represent what would happen tot he web if it passed. There was probably a change.org petition as well, but that had little or no impact. Action + petition == Action.
- SOPA was a law proposed by the government. In theory, the government is supposed to represent the interests of the people, and thus in theory they have to listen when all of their constituents scream out in a unified "Noooooooooooooo!". Google is not a government. Google does not have to answer to anybody but their shareholders, and their shareholders don't care about Reader unless it affects the bottom line.
If you want to make Google bring Reader back, you're going to need to organize a significant boycott of
all Google products. This isn't just, "Oh, I'll start using Bing and Firefox and replace my Android phone with an iPhone." You need to get every website on Google's ad platform switched off to something else. Every business that pays for Google's hosted services and app platform need to move to something else. You have to hit them right in the money, and a "handful" (100,000+ users isn't even a noticeable blip to Google) of people switching to Bing isn't going to make them notice at all.
And then if you
did succeed in shutting down all of Google's revenue streams, they're just going to go out of business rather than bring back Reader.