The SOPA/PIPA debate is not really about the freedom of the internet. It's a battle between massive corporations seeking to protect their own interests
"This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud." For people who grew up at a certain time with a thick glowing monitor casting light on their faces these were the closing words of their own Declaration of Independence. For those people the internet was not a layout of graphics and flash videos blaring from every website, but amalgams of text. The internet before the internet was an elitist place, like Linux, it was part puzzle and part love of taking intangible things apart and putting them back together again.
Like most revolutionaries they were doomed to be made irrelevant by the consequences of the forces that they had set in motion. The curiosity that was their code of honor has been overtaken by the world that they helped open up. And that world is an amazing place.