OK, maybe not much.  And maybe you think the proposed legislation known as SOPA in the House and PIPA in the Senate doesn't have much chance of affecting you, if you don't download illegal music or watch pirated movies.

But do you ever use Google?  How about Facebook?  Ever watch a video on Youtube about knitting?

Yeah, I thought so.

If the Internet is something you use on a regular basis, I suggest you do a little reading, click around the interwebs and ask a few questions today.

Question 1:  who do you trust to know more about how the internet actually works:  legislators and lobbyists in the pay of Rupert Murdoch, or the guy who founded Wikipedia and the guy who runs the Cheezburger network?

Question 2:  How much do you like the way China's government controls their people's internet access?

Here is a link to a CNN interview with one of the founders of Wikipedia, where he addresses those two questions and explains what's wrong with the bills as they are currently written.

Question 3:  Are you prepared to put the free and fair use of online information in the hands of the same people in government who brought you the massive banking and foreclosure crisis, and trust that the power embodied in having control of the Internet won't be abused by them (and the people bankrolling them)?

Yeah, I should hope not.

There are better ways to do what these bills purport to do — that is, to stop the piracy of intellectual property on foreign-based websites.  Now, if you believe that is a worthwhile thing, and that these bills do just that, allow me to quote to you from the people at Google:

“Like many businesses, entrepreneurs and Web users, we oppose these bills because there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking American companies to censor the Internet,” Samantha Smith, a Google spokeswoman, said in an email Tuesday. “So tomorrow we will be joining many other tech companies to highlight this issue on our U.S. home page.”

And finally, let me encourage you to sign this petition (one of many out there) and add your voice to the millions of Internet users who are urging their elected representatives to reject this legislation.

Thanks for reading.