This Internet blackout has been brought to you by the U.S. Congress

If you are reading this, then there is nothing wrong with your Internet connection. But if you log on Wednesday and find some of your favorite websites have gone dark, you’ll have only Congress to blame.

If you dial up Reddit, Wikipedia, Boing Boing, Mozilla.org, Tucows, or dozens of other sites tomorrow, you may find nothing but a black screen. They’re all participating in the call for an Internet blackout to protest two proposed copyright laws: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA).

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The idea behind SOPA and PIPA is to combat Internet piracy that occurs outside our borders, where U.S. laws hold no sway. The lawmakers’ solution: Make those sites invisible to U.S. citizens by forcing ISPs and other service providers to wipe the names of infringing sites from DNS records. Though they’d still be accessible by IP address, the domain names themselves would not resolve.

What would that do? It might stop GetPiratedMoviesHere.com from being accessed by nonsavvy netizens. It could also block sites like WikiLeaks, which has published secret copyrighted materials from banks and other organizations. In fact, it seems pretty clear this law is at least partially designed to take down WikiLeaks, which is hosted in Iceland.

It gets worse: Sites that may contain a single page of infringing material could suddenly go dark. Sites that contain links to pages of infringing material might also get blacklisted. Good-bye Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, and Twitter.

An analysis of PIPA by five independent security wonks [PDF] says the law would gut efforts at increasing the security of the domain name system while doing nothing to prevent actual piracy. It could also cause “significant collateral damage” by inadvertently filtering non-infringing sites.

But the Hollywood/media cartel doesn’t care about collateral damage. Remember, the biggest trade groups greasing the wheels on this train wreck are the RIAA, the MPAA, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose politics are slightly to the right of Mussolini.

Want to see where all this grease is going? Propublica has a handy color-coded guide to where your congressional lapdogs stand on these bills. It’s an odd mix of bedfellows on either side of the issue, but it’s pretty clear whose money is doing most of the talking. According to Congressional money watchdog Maplight.org, industries supporting SOPA have funneled more than $92 million to members of Congress since July 2009 — or 13 times as much as those who oppose it.

Ohio Republican John Boehner is the lottery winner here, pulling in nearly $1.5 million from SOPA supporters vs. just $80,000 from its opponents. Lead dog on the Dem’s gravy train is Iowa’s Bruce Braley with just over $900,000 in pro-SOPA money (and just $27,000 anti).

Responding to mounting pressure from the Internet, the White House finally weighed in, saying it likes some parts of these laws but not others. To wit:

Our analysis of the DNS filtering provisions in some proposed legislation suggests that they pose a real risk to cybersecurity and yet leave contraband goods and services accessible online. We must avoid legislation that drives users to dangerous, unreliable DNS servers and puts next-generation security policies, such as the deployment of DNSSEC, at risk.

Media megabillionaire and phone tapper to the stars Rupert Murdoch felt compelled to respond via his new Twitter account: “So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery.”

(Remember, this is the same guy who bought the world’s largest social network for nearly $600 million and turned it into a punch line. Six years later, he dumped it for $35 million and a box of crullers. He’s not exactly the go-to guy for advice about the InterWebs.)

Unlike Rupes (and all of his news outlets), most thinking bipeds understand that life isn’t a binary proposition. You can oppose Internet piracy and oppose these badly written laws.

At the moment, SOPA and PIPA have been sent back to the shop for tweaking; most likely some or all of the DNS blocking provisions may be removed. But those who are crowing about how “the Internet won” are celebrating too soon. Make no mistake, we’re going to get some kind of pro-copyright/anti-piracy law out of this Congress. Let us hope and pray it’s not as brain-dead as most of the technology legislation our government has passed.

Where do you stand on SOPA/PIPA? Post your thoughts below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “This Internet blackout has been brought to you by the U.S. Congress,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.