The United States Justice Department shut down Megaupload and its sis­ter web­sites last Thursday, remov­ing a web­site that receives fifty mil­lion daily vis­i­tors and accounts for 4 per­cent of all traf­fic on the Internet.

Megaupload, a site noto­ri­ous for its pirated mate­r­ial, is also used for legit­i­mate uses such as busi­ness and indi­vid­u­als to share large files too big for email.

The shut­down was due to a 72-page indict­ment by the Justice Department against the Hong Kong based com­pany (which they refer to as the “Mega Conspiracy”), which included the arrest of Dutch cit­i­zen and founder Kim Schmitz in New Zealand for crimes in the US. The rea­son the US had juris­dic­tion was because Megaupload had leased a few servers in Virginia, even though they are mainly an inter­na­tional business.

The tim­ing of such attacks came right after the SOPA/PIPA black­out protests on Jan. 19. The Internet group Anonymous, based out of the web­site 4chan, retal­i­ated in their own way by orga­niz­ing DDoS (dis­trib­uted denial of ser­vice) attacks on over a dozen web­sites includ­ing the FBI, Justice Department, and sev­eral music and movie indus­try com­pa­nies, caus­ing them to go offline temporarily.

Although the web­site had mali­cious intent, the gov­ern­ment take­down may be a sign of things to come with more con­trol over what used to be the free exchange of infor­ma­tion called the Internet.