eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Prepare to be stunned: There is offensive material on the Web. Some of it is obscene, some violent, some racist. Oh well, it’s a free country, right?
Well, sort of. It wasn’t so free for Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who has been in the news lately for a controversial film he intends to produce. The film is called Fitna and Wilders describes it as a call to action against the Koran, which he describes as “a fascist book” and Islam as “something that is at least very bad for our values and our society.”
Yikes, that’s incendiary all right. Mind you, this movie does not yet exist. But for weeks other Dutch officials have been publicly pressuring Wilders not to make it, and that’s on top of the very loud protests from the Muslim world.
Some of those protests reached Network Solutions, the famous domain registrar, which holds the domain for a site Wilders made to promote the film and hosted the content. Recently, in response to complaints, Network Solutions removed access to the site and replaced it with a notice that the company was investigating claims that the site violated its terms of service.
Network Solutions spokesperson Susan Wade was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that “[I]n this situation with the dialogue that’s happening throughout the world we’ve made the choice to suspend the site as of last night…This site is suspended so people can’t see the content right now but the customer still has access to their site. They can make whatever changes are necessary as we complete our investigation.”
The same AP story says that the site had shown the movie’s “title, ‘Fitna,’ the words ‘Coming Soon’ and an image of a gilded Quran.”
This is a complicated story. Much of the discussion around it has had to do with Netsol’s role as a registrar. But I think it’s more important that they are also the Web host for the site. This, it seems to me, makes an important difference, since the content is actually on servers owned by Network Solutions. Does it make enough of a difference?
Network Solutions’ hosting terms of service says that the company has the right to remove any “material that is obscene, defamatory, libelous, unlawful, harassing, abusive… hate propaganda” and “profane, indecent or otherwise objectionable material of any kind or nature.”
Well, that’s comprehensive: “…otherwise objectionable material of any kind or nature” seems to me to bring within it potentially anything at all.
Given all that, let’s re-examine what was on the site at the time Network Solutions took it down: the movie’s title (“Fitna”), the words “Coming Soon” and an image of a gilded Quran. We all might know what Wilders planned to do in the movie, because he said so elsewhere, but there’s nothing on that site that violates Network Solutions’ terms of service unless they are interpreting those terms in the most flexible way they can, as I said, as a stopgap to let them be arbitrary.
And arbitrary it is. John Berryhill points out that other sites are up, even on Network Solutions’ networks, that one could easily interpret as objectionable, such as the Tamil Tiger Web site eelamweb.com.
The number of sites and domains managed by a company like Network Solutions is so huge that it’s impossible for them to police them for violations of terms, especially such nebulous terms. If they can’t at least be consistent, and if they’re going to take a site down merely because it might become offensive some day, or perhaps simply because some other people object to it, then they’re being arbitrary.
I already knew better than to trust Network Solutions, but this event is still disappointing. I don’t know whether callous or spineless is the better adjective for it, but whatever the word is, it’s not a good one. Even from Network Solutions we should expect more.
Security Center Editor Larry Seltzer has worked in and written about the computer industry since 1983.
For insights on security coverage around the Web, take a look at eWEEK.com Security Center Editor Larry Seltzer’s blog Cheap Hack.