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Yahoo! Radio shut down for today, maybe forever.

Joining a slew of other Internet radio broadcasters, Yahoo! turn of the music to protest the new royalty rates.

In response to a impending royalty rate increase that, if implemented, would lead to the virtual shutdown of Internet radio in the U.S., thousands of webcasters plan to go silent Tuesday, June 26, to draw attention to their industry's plight.

This "Day of Silence" is an encore of a successful media event that small webcasters organized on May 1, 2002 in response to a similarly royalty rate ruling from a Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP). That event garnered national attention and was subsequently followed by a rate cut by the Librarian of Congress and the passage of the Small Webcaster Settlement Act for the period 1998-2005.

This time around, the Day of Silence is backed by the big names like Yahoo! LAUNCHcast, Live365, and MTV Online, plus many NPR stations and traditional radio stations that stream their over-the-air broadcasts online. Hopefully the results will be the same as last time. Yahoo! claims they won't run their broadcast at a lost, but big companies usually make that decision after they see where the chips fall. It the smaller operators that are again in danger.