(2010-12-01) Amazon Stops Hosting Wikileaks

Amazon.com has taken down the WikiLeaks web site under what appears to be pressure from the U.S. government. Senator Joseph Lieberman issued a statement saying that Amazon.com has informed his staff that the company has ceased hosting Wikileaks... As we reported earlier this week, Wikileaks appears to have moved its main site to AWS in an attempt to thwart a denial-of-service attack against its servers that began last Sunday. Why your Dark Net needs to be P2P.

(See 2010-11-28-WikileaksUsDiplomaticCables about non-Amazon aspects of latest leak.)

Ryan Tate calls out their hypocrisy (in this and other cases). When you're the "largest bookstore in the world", do you become a Common Carrier?

Phil Jones is doing his part, putting up BitTorrent and Boycott-ing Amazon.

Daniel Ellsberg is Boycott-ing too.

EFF notes.

Yet another reason to avoid supporting a BigWorld Monoculture. (Some people think the problem is privatization, but are you counting on Joe L to have less control over a public webhost infrastructure?)

Dec13: Douglas Rushkoff points out the centralization inherent in the DNS, and Paul Garrin's work in the 1990s with Name.Space.