Tuesday, June 13, 2017

Getting a website shut-down

and barring the author access to the Internet.

There are only a very few cases where this is possible. These include where a Nation-State has the power to block and pursue criminal proceedings against the operator who is engaging in activity that is disadvantageous to the State. This would include the promotion of terrorism and hate, possibly the commission of other criminal acts. In many cases some Nation-States, such as China, Internet content is highly controlled as there is a great desire to limit what their citizens see of the outside world.

As a private citizen, or an enterprise, you are not likely to be in any position to have content removed from the Internet and the authors of websites banned from posting their thoughts on any subject. You may not like what they say, but the Internet is largely an open forum for free-speech.

It has been claimed that I have had my website shut down and that I was banned from the Internet. This was not the case. At the time I was self-hosting my website on my Rogers cable connection using a Linux server in my basement. I was not sure if this was allowed under the EUA that I had with Rogers but they did not seem to care. The unfortunate consequence of using my home connection to host a website was that the I address resolved to the location of the Rogers server. A person that I was having a dispute with at the time, it is presumed,  contacted Rogers and asked to have my connection revoked. They did not do this and in fact never contacted me about the matter. However, at the same time I decided that my experiment with self-hosting had come to a conclusion so I reverted to a private hosting service. The process to migrate to this service took some time. At no time was my Internet connection disrupted.

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