There's a lot of talk about corporate personhood being bad - and SOPA/PIPA was primarily motivated by corporations exerting free speech rights. (Yes, there was a major response by people to the actions taken by the corporations, but both SOPA and PIPA were around long before the corporate blackouts and barely noticed.)
So - are we only against corporate personhood when they speak with a voice we don't like? What about when they use their money to motivate our voices?
http://www.valleyadvocate.com/article.cfm?aid=14608
UCLA Law School professor Eugene Volokh challenges the idea that people who like today's "blackout" protests by Internet companies can also dislike the now-lowered limits on corporate speech thanks to the Citizens United decision:
Today, Google’s U.S. query page features an anti-Stop-Online-Piracy-Act statement from Google. Say that Congress concludes that it’s unfair for Google to be able to speak so broadly, in a way that ordinary Americans (including ordinary Congressmen) generally can’t. Congress therefore enacts a statute banning all corporations from spending their money — and therefore banning them from speaking — in support of or opposition to any statute. What would you say about such a statute? Again, I limit the question to those who think corporations generally lack First Amendment rights.
Per the Wall Street Journal, ComScore estimates 10 million people will feel the effects of the Wikipedia blackout today. Everyone who visits Google Search's homepage, everyone who tries to go to Reddit during the 12-hour period from 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. EST, everyone who visits any of a number of other high-volume sites will also get the message. In terms of scale and scope for a single political message, this is, at the least, very rare. Are the rules different in a case like this? And should they be?
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