The Fourth Place

I was pleasantly surprised to find my old phone, like many others, has a value despite being broken and unusable. Mobiles are a great example of the market delivering on reduce, reuse, recycle.

Fasthosts, that bastion of the web hosting industry and pillar of the Gloucestershire community has pulled the plug on a web server hosting several important (and some less important) political blogs, including that of Boris Johnson. They say its because accusations made by Craig Murray and Tim Ireland at bloggerheads defamed a certain controvertial Russian, and mention a lawyers letter.

“In this case, we examined a website for potentially defamatory material and communicated to the customer that they had indeed breached the terms and conditions for Fasthosts Internet hosting.”

Would someone please pull the plug on this pathetic institution?

More on Fasthosts at the Register.

Links and quotes added 22/09/2007.

Easy:

No Government shall be permitted to initiate any action or pass any
rule whatsoever in relation to the Internet, except to permit
communication by a Government to the public according to the Internet’s
normal protocols or to clarify how the rules of the land will apply to
Internet communication and commerce affecting those within the
Government’s jurisdiction.

I posted the above, half jokingly and half seriously to the ORG discuss list in response to a post on the Dialogue Forum on Internet Rights’ forthcoming meeting. It is obvious that no Government could agree to such a statement because so many groups out there see the Internet as some unique and special evil and there are votes in promises to do something about it.