Didn't know about this until now.
Sounds completely ridiculous.
It's been a huge deal on sites like Reddit for months. For example, it was found out that GoDaddy supported SOPA... so users on Reddit lead a boycott of GoDaddy by asking users to transfer their domains to a different provider. At first Godaddy seemed to laugh it off... but thousands of people switched (godaddy is overpriced anyways)... then Godaddy lied about no longer supporting SOPA... so thousands of others dumped them...
At this point they seemingly are against SOPA, but it's mostly because they had no choice... it was a public relations nightmare for them.
Basically months of outcries on sites like Reddit pushed sites like Wikipedia and Google to finally do something to raise awareness. The fact that you're only hearing about it today shows that it was necessary.