WikiLeaks fights to stay online after US company withdraws domain name

The California-based internet hosting provider that dropped WikiLeaks at 3am GMT on Friday, Everydns, says it did so to prevent its other 500,000 customers of being affected by the intense cyber attacks targeted at WikiLeaks.

This may involve direct assaults on those associated with Wikileaks, and will almost certainly involve attacks on currently existing Internet freedoms.

I gave a presentation to some network operators on a related very topic a few years ago. My point was that small companies, which operate boutique ISPs and name registrars are in a very weak position. They get phoned up at 2am by someone claiming to be a lawyer, or to have met a lawyer once, and told that one of their customers is breaking "the law". The support guy is a geek at home with the DNS and Ciscos, not a lawyer, and panics, His manager is trying to make a buck, and doesn't see why he should have to be the brave defender of free speech when all he's trying to do is run a business. And so, the domain/host gets killed.

"Freedom of Speech" is somewhat more complex than is being made out. If I'm a private printing press, I'm perfectly entitled to turn away your business if I don't like the books you're publishing, subject to a few discrimination laws that don't apply in this case. The unfortunate problem, as Assange is finding, is that on an Internet where everyone who operates the network is a commercial actor, your right of free speech only extends as far as the willingness of an operator to help you. If they say "sorry, not for us, try the shop down the road", you're a bit screwed.

No one is going to operate an open-access printer that takes no account of the content so you're always at the mercy of the commercial realities of the people with the printing press. The SWP could buy a printing press to bypass this problem; it's harder to buy your own Internet. Those with long memories will recall GreenNet, set up for precisely this reason.

What kind of twisted logic is this?

What kind of twisted logic is this? What this reveals starkly is the neo-mideivelist, dark age tendencies underlying the supposed democracy of the internet.