The Day They Shut Down the Internet

"Were proof needed of the dangers and abuses of the corporatization of the Internet, we've just been hit with a whopper."

"Last month, Earthlink decided to block all email coming from Europe. That's right! If you're an Earthlink subscriber and somebody in Europe sent email to your Earthlink address during the first two weeks of January, you probably didn't get it.... The abuse shouldn't surprise anyone. It's the third such major abuse incident in the last two years.

The first, that I noticed anyway, occurred the night of the initial raid on Iraq... As the raid was ongoing, traffic over the Internet between the United States and other countries was curtailed or suspended entirely. Most of us couldn't reach foreign sites or use Yahoo, whose system depends partly on off-shore servers.