My site and thousands of others use the same free hosting. Thank you Userland!
Recently all these sites have been hard to reach. Why? Userland’s Dave Winer tracked the problem. Then things turned ugly: Winer discovered that their ISP couldn’t provide as reliable service as they had advertised. He repeatedly said so on his own site – and the ISP decided to shut him down!
Userland’s problems are not unique. IRights lists several cases where ISP:s shut down sites because of their content.
The Userland discussion group has several threads about these problems. And Dan Gillmor is working on an article about ISP’s and their power relative customers.
The freedom of speech that is taken for granted on the Internet is very vulnerable. The First Amendment of the American constitution may not apply – and in Europe the concept doesn’t even exist. Very little stops european politicians from trying to control what can be said on the Internet.
The situation in Sweden (where I live) is not as bad as in Britain yet – but there is a worrying trend towards a more restrictive european praxis.
Here is a swedish site about PUL (a law which restricts what can and cannot be said about individual persons).