Hijexx wrote:
For what it's worth, I think the current situation will not kill Crytome.org. This just tells me get a different ISP and boycott NTT. Now, if he shops around and EVERY ISP snubs him for undisclosed reasons, that's a cause for concern and is a bigger issue.

I agree. He'll pop up somewhere else. The question is where. He may have difficultly easily finding an ISP that will work with him rather than shutting him down. There is a significant difference between:

A. Being able to host controversial material pretty much anywhere in the U.S. without problems. This generally means that normal people can exercise their first amendment rights.

B. Being able to host controversial material most places in the U.S. as long as you are savvy at dealing with lawyers. This generally means that normal people can only really exercise their first amendment rights with assistence of counsel.

C. Being able to host controversial material but only at a select few ISPS along with the aforementioned legal counsel. This generally means that you have to go to a lot of effort in order to avoid censorship of legal material. You must be very calculated about what you do. Exercise of First Amenment rights is significantly chilled.

D. Not being able to host controverisal material in the U.S. at all. This means that totally legal material that is First Amendment protected cannot be placed on the Internet in the U.S... Exercise of First Amendment rights is curtailed in practice by the collective policies of ISPs. This is a partial practical failure of the right to open political discourse.

E. Not being able to host controversial material on the Internet in an open fashion at all. This means that totally legal material (under U.S. law) cannot be hosted through any legitimate means and must be distributed through p2p file trading networks and other underground facilities. This is a complete practical failure of the right to open political discourse.

I think in reality the situation wavers between B and C today depending on specifically why your content is controversial. Some ISPs are worse than others in terms of shutting things down, and you have to understand when and how to fight DMCA requests and other attacks. If things push toward D or E, it will spawn underground networks dedicated to the dissemination of legal material that will, in turn, make illegal material harder to control.

Of course, we already have networks dedicated to the disemmination of illegal material. They are mostly a product of the fact that the music and tech industries have dragged their feet on producing effective, legal means for consumers to obtain digital music that works with the devices they want and runs under the business models they want.

There was (an is) a demand there, and it originally wasn't met at all, and today it is only partially met, and so it got filled by other means. Once those means exist and propagate they become appropriated by things like child pornography that you do really want to stop people from accessing, and once the cats are out of the bag its hard to put them back in.

Casting something like Cryptome into the blacknets is likely to be very, very bad for the rule of law.

RE: Cryptome Shutdown by Verio/NTT