Though it is not yet safe to say that the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) have been wholly defeated, these attempts at Internet age sanctions and regulations have some wounds to lick before they find themselves again on the trading floor of the U.S. Congress.

For all the oversight and ignorance that lead to the proposal of SOPA/PIPA, the debates surrounding them gave the American people something they could sink their teeth into politically, so it is safe to say that these bills may have been a blessing in disguise for an increasingly divided nation.

In 2011, the global community was rocked by uprisings and a falling market.  In the U.S., the failing economy has done a great deal of harm to many people. Abroad, the debt crises has in many instances lead to violence and the mood is very tense all the way around the Mediterranean and into the Middle East where regime ousting has been the theme as of late.

Many of these countries in the midst of uprisings and on the verge of civil war in that region have relied heavily on "circumvention tools" to maintain open lines of communication during these struggles, according to a report on the subject released in late 2010 by Hal Roberts, Ethan Zuckerman, Jillian York, and John Palfrey, all hailing from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard.

"Circumvention tools allow users to bypass Internet filtering to access content otherwise blocked by governments, workplaces, schools, or even the blocked sites themselves […] Every type of circumvention tool provides the same basic functionality — proxying user connections to provide access to otherwise blocked sites."

In response to having the information contained in that report used to support SOPA, John Palfrey released a statement disagreeing with the use of their findings for that purpose.

"The single biggest funder of circumvention tools has been and remains the U.S. government, precisely because of the role the tools play in online activism. It would be highly counter-productive for the U.S. government to both fund and outlaw the same set of tools."

The drafting of SOPA/PIPA could only have occurred (and as admitted by a handful of Representatives, in fact did occur) in a situation where the parties involved in its creation were completely oblivious to the operating environment of the Internet and the technical repercussions of their propositions.

In their attempt to reign in the Internet, it was the Internet that made it possible for the bills to be defeated. Mass information blackouts were conducted by several major websites in protest of web censorship, and the American people were able to directly and effectively communicate their disapproval over the implications of such legislation to their leaders through their connection to the Internet and the social media outlets that can be found there.

In the movements and protests around the globe that received the most attention from the media, a common theme has been their dedication to a more equitable distribution of wealth and power. The highly publicized Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests represent an arguably failed attempt to stand for this cause, mostly due to the lack of clearly defined focus.

In the instance of SOPA/PIPA protests, there was specificity to the issue at hand that made it easy to choose a side when the time came.

It would be naïve to think that these protests had nothing to do with one another, which is why I bring up the former. In fact it may have been the OWS movement that led people to start paying attention close enough to what happens in Washington at that crucial point when this bill hit the headlines.

It is possible that the OWS movement is responsible for one of the most successful instances to date of what Somini Sengupta referred to as "lobbying 2.0" in the same issue of The New York Times referenced above; to defeat SOPA, the will of the people of this country was gathered together, not in a square, but in forums and on micro blogs where they found common ground around an idea.

President Barack Obama's stance is that it cannot support legislation that could lead our country down the long and winding road towards Internet censorship, as stated on Jan. 14 in response to a petition opposing SOPA. The administration does, however, support efforts to create a piece of legislation that addresses the issue of intellectual property theft without infringing on anyone's right to look up whatever they want on Google.

With that in mind, there is no doubt we have not heard the last of these bills, so let's hope that everyone is still paying attention when they resurface. If they are not, then any effect of the solidarity that sprang up surrounding these bills could end up being no more than another signal flare in the forgetful dark.