A few minutes ago, I pointed my mobile phone at a soda bottle and scanned the product's bar code. A few seconds later, the screen displayed this message: "Item OK! This is not a Sopa-supporting product."

The mobile app was an experiment, created by two Canadian college students who want to help derail Sopa, the notorious Stop Online Piracy Act internet censorship bill now making its way through Congress. Since the app was launched last week, more than 17,000 people have downloaded it.

But the app, called "Boycott Sopa", is more than just a clever idea. It suggests deep implications about the future of commerce and politics – and how our individual choices, based on better and better information, will influence both.

The app, available in the Android marketplace, is in an early incarnation. It checks a product against a database to see if it's "either created by or intimately related to Sopa-supporting companies", and lets you know either way.

Christopher Thompson and Chris Duranti are the creators of Boycott Sopa, which had been used to scan more than 11,000 items when I spoke with them on Wednesday. They are third-year computer-science students at the University of British Columbia. They've gotten a lot of attention for this app, and they should.

They aren't onto something absolutely new, of course. About a decade ago, Marc Smith, then a Microsoft researcher, did an early version of this idea when he and colleagues equipped a handheld computer with a wireless internet connection and a bar-code scanner, and then scanned products in stores, connecting the brand and product to databases (pdf). As I wrote in my 2004 book, We the Media, this meant that information about the product and its maker would exist in a broader information ecosystem:

"Was a shirt made by slave labor? Did the can of processed food come from a company with a record of poisoning streams in its factories' backyards? Did the company have a reputation for being good to employees and the environment?"

Since Smith did his tests, the information ecosystem has evolved in powerful ways. With smarter phones and networks, coupled with easy ways to connect data, the possibilities are nearly limitless now. Duranti and Thompson are following a number of people who've experimented with this notion in recent years. Their anti-Sopa idea has struck a chord and could well be the catalyst that sparks not just further development of their own app but lots of direct competition.

I'd been contemplating something similar, actually. Charles and David Koch, the billionaire brothers who control privately-held Koch Industries, support a number of causes that would revert the American political system into an undemocratic and unrepublican (small "d" and "r") version of the Gilded Age's worst excesses. Koch Industries sells all kinds of consumer products, so I'd prefer not to buy any, thereby giving them slightly fewer dollars with which to poison society. So I was planning an app that would create a "Koch test" similar to the Sopa app that's actually available.

"Actually available" is what matters, of course. Ideas are easy. Getting things done is the hard part. Thompson and Duranti have done what a lot of us have only talked about – including a message thread on Reddit where they saw the idea and only built the app when no one else did – and I'm glad to see it.

The fact that they could just do it highlights what's now possible with digital media: a good idea can become a working service in a hurry, and for little or no money. It took the two students about 20 hours, they told me, from when they decided to do the project to when they launched their initial app. And if it gets big, they'll be able to grow their user base fast with a relatively minimal investment in web-based services.

Thompson and Duranti say they've been asked to make their app more open to suggestions – that is, to create a more generic platform on which the rest of us could add our own causes and preferences. They're working on a new version, about which they didn't say too much, that apparently will go in that direction. That's good to hear, too.

I'm not certain if they have commercial possibilities (I made a donation on their website). But as I told them, they'll probably have investors making unsolicited calls once they develop the project a bit more. That said, I'd personally be happiest to see this as an an open-source, community-driven platform, and if such a thing is not already under way, I'm positive it will be soon. The idea is sufficiently compelling that competition is a given, and this strikes me as an ideally initiative for widely cooperative development and extension – especially among people who don't agree with each other politically.

That's because the ultimate goal should be to turn shopping into an exercise that lets customers make choices based on their beliefs. Some people may think child labor under harsh conditions is a valuable form of economic development; others, including me, will avoid goods made that way if we can. I don't want to buy products made by tech companies that sell surveillance systems to dictators. And so on. The point is that customers – singly and in communities of their own choosing – should make our own decisions about what kinds of practices we consider ethical. Boycott Sopa would be an excellent tool also for someone who favors internet censorship on behalf of copyright holders.

In my own contemplation of how this shoppers' aid would work, a thumbs-up or -down mobile app is just the beginning. Some feature thoughts:

• Make the platform as extensible and flexible as possible. That is, as suggested above, give users a way to make use of their own data sets and preferences, and then to combine them for nuanced views of individual companies under a broad array of practices and policies. I might want to boycott company X for its support of Sopa, but maybe it's doing enough honorable work in other arenas to give me second thoughts. (Probably not in this case; Sopa is such a dangerous bill that I'll avoid its supporters wherever possible.)

• Create a companion plug-in for web browsers, to make this service work in the physical and virtual worlds. The mobile scanner is for stores, but I'd like the same capabilities when I'm shopping online.

• Whatever my buying choice, have the app or browser send a message to the company saying, "I didn't buy your product because you are supporting internet censorship" or "I chose your product because you oppose internet censorship."

• Work extremely hard to have "clean data" – information that is accurate, so that people are making their decisions based on reality and not mistakes. I'd guess that an open-source approach would be useful here, because large communities may be inherently better-equipped to flag and fix these kinds of mistakes.

• Give companies a way to join a larger conversation. In particular, if a company changes a position based on customers' ethically driven decisions, it should have a way to let people know that the position changed.

This is just the beginning. Computer-based visual recognition of objects and people is moving swiftly into reality. The augmented reality folks, who give us visual overlays over everyday places, are all over this idea. We won't need bar codes much longer to identify much of anything, a prospect that is at once enthralling and terrifying (the latter from a privacy standpoint). Politicians have necessarily public faces. Maybe Duranti and Thompson, or some other smart folks, could add a popup to web videos showing politicians, telling me whether they support Sopa – and then, at my request, a) sending a campaign contribution to an opponent who opposes the legislation; and b) telling both of them what I just did, and why.