By now, if your awareness level concerning Internet regulation bills like CISPA and its SOPA/PIPA predecessors hasn’t increased, you’re doing yourself a disservice. It could be the fact that after SOPA was defeated, people thought the fight was over. Or it could be people are waiting on Wikipedia to blackout before they get mad.

Unfortunately, there may not be a Internet-wide blackout this time around, which means people are going to have to inform themselves instead of relying on a service to voluntarily turn itself off before they fight back. Of course, it could be said the reason people were fighting back against SOPA was due to its trend status, something the Internet blackout directly contributed to. Without people talking about the blackout on services like Twitter and Facebook, the buzz concerning SOPA might have remained low enough for the government to sneak it through.

Instead of waiting on an Internet blackout that may not even happen, people should apply the lessons they learned from SOPA and inform themselves about the potential issues CISPA presents. To facilitate this process, the group at Paralegal.net have created a “WTF is CISPA” infographic, and if you take the time and use it to your benefit, you’ll soon see the fight for an open Internet did not end when SOPA collapsed on itself:

Much like the graphic points out, don’t rely on web companies to tell you when it’s time to act. Don’t wait on a blackout that may never come to motivate you. Of course, the fact that people waited until certain services were blacked out to protest SOPA makes me question their motivations. Were they pissed they couldn’t find an answer for their homework or were they really mad about the damage such bills could do?