
The Blog That Disappeared - jakevoytko
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/30/opinion/sunday/the-blog-that-disappeared.html
======
Udo
It doesn't really matter whether Google was "in the right" or what the
backstory of this case is. It's also not a question of bringing this to the
attention of the "right" people at Google. This is an issue inherent to the
entire system. The problem is that people entrust their work and often their
entire public persona to entities that are guaranteed not to act in their
interest.

I don't even think this is about _access_ to decentralized alternatives, after
all if you devote years of content to a platform you can probably manage to go
through some technical setup pain. Gmail, Blogger, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook
- there are self-hosted alternatives out there to all of them, but the big
trade-off is that content creators have to shoot themselves in the foot on
_discoverability_ if they opt out of the big platforms.

Either at some point we will collectively wise up and re-decentralize or we'll
go further down the path we're already on. Our lives ruled arbitrarily by DRM
and ToS. I do recognize that I'm personally part of the problem, it's really
hard to opt out.

~~~
jacquesm
> Either at some point we will collectively wise up and re-decentralize or
> we'll go further down the path we're already on.

It'll have to get a lot worse before it will get better. This is just another
case of the pendulum swinging, and for me the reason to stay away from these
centralized services as much as I can. This isn't always easy, especially not
when for other people the web is now synonymous with Facebook and Google (and
maybe one or two other websites).

Over the years the trend has been a steady reduction in the number of websites
that the average surfer uses on a daily basis, this is now < 10 for most
people, with a shockingly low 90 or so websites visited per month.

Silo-forming is a logical response to the messy free-for-all that we had (in
part Facebooks success is the fact that it _limited_ freedom of expression
over HTML), but this has now far overshot the mark where dependency on these
very large services is fast becoming an Achilles heel.

~~~
Udo
As someone who in the past tried very unsuccessfully to get a distributed
social network off the ground, I'm frustrated by the utter lack of interest in
the silo dilemma. Even when a high profile case of someone getting screwed
makes it onto the news (and it recently did!), nobody seems to have a problem
with the basics of our way of doing things.

It's stunning to me that we live in a world where the technological
infrastructure for a federated web is better than it has ever been, yet at the
same time interest is at an all-time low. But I still believe it doesn't take
much to start a swing in the other direction. If tomorrow a couple of HN users
got together and formed a loosely-affiliated working group for
decentralization, there is a decent chance the current momentum could be
meaningfully changed.

~~~
jasode
_> It's stunning to me that we live in a world where the technological
infrastructure for a federated web is better than it has ever been, _

In my opinion, this type of "technical" thinking contributes to misdiagnosing
_why_ the majority do not use decentralized services.

Likewise, thinking in terms of technology & software like the "fathers of
Internet"[1] have done to try and "solve" the adoption of decentralized
ecosystem is misguided. Instead of thinking in terms of the "software stack",
think about the _economics_. Yes, luminaries like Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-
Lee are smart but they don't seem to ever address the _economics_ of why a
billion people won't choose to run a decentralized stack from home computers.
Not just economics of bandwidth and harddrives but also economics of diffused
trust, security updates, etc.

My theory on why they don't put economics at the forefront of their pleas for
a decentralized internet: their formative years of the internet happened when
the entire Internet was _sponsored_ by the government and universities. So to
them, it just seems like today's problem can be solved with "technology".

 _> If tomorrow a couple of HN users got together and formed a loosely-
affiliated working group for decentralization, there is a decent chance the
current momentum could be meaningfully changed._

I respectfully disagree. I think creating a "decentralized-Facebook" such as
Diaspora to be adopted by a billion people is extremely difficult ... because
it's a _very hard economics puzzle_. I'm dismayed that 99% of blog posts
advocating for decentralization never deconstructs this factor. It's
handicapping our ability to analyze the situation.

[1][http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-
valley/telecom/intern...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-
valley/telecom/internet/the-fathers-of-the-internet-revolution-urge-todays-
pioneers-to-reinvent-the-web)

~~~
mxuribe
I really, really hate to admit it, but your points on economic perspective are
very good. :-)

I say "hate to admit" because I'm very much a proponent of decentralized
services, and wish for more people to use them...but i guess like others my
optimism might blind me a tad to the realities of typical/common user
behaviors (and expectations), as well as the reasons and sources of those
behaviors (and expectations). I guess users of decentralized services can
continue to "throw their own parties", but it might mean not everyone will
ever go to said parties. Ah well.

~~~
sanderjd
> it might mean not everyone will ever go to said parties

It only means that as long as people think "better" technology is the answer.
I think the answer, if it comes, will be in the form of a new take on the
incentive structures ("economics") involved, which will probably require some
new technology, but will not be driven by it. It isn't a hopeless battle, it
just isn't one that will be won with technology alone.

~~~
jacquesm
But the economics are there. If there is money in centralized solutions that
same budget is (theoretically) available for de-centralized solutions.

------
bko
I don't think it's in Google's interest to just indiscriminately delete
someone's blog. Google rarely makes decisions on a human level and prefers not
to intervene. They are getting a lot of bad press from this that the
management would probably prefer to go away. I think the answer lies in this:

> We are aware of this matter, but the specific Terms of Service violations
> are ones we cannot discuss further due to legal considerations

I think the most likely scenario has to do with cp. IANAL, but I think in many
jurisdictions cp has strict liability, meaning that if you are in possession,
knowingly or not, you are criminally liable. If the author was hosting or
somehow tied in to cp, the authorities would likely force Google to take it
down and hand it over for investigation. The case is probably still being
investigated so no action has been taken, but if Google hands over the
archive, it would likely be liable for dissemination of cp.

This seems to be a lot more reasonable explanation to the secrecy than the
standard "Google is evil" argument. The main thing that makes me doubt this
explanation is the authors vocal outcry. If he were involved in some nefarious
activity, I would imagine he would just disappear into the shadows if he
suspected his acts were close to being uncovered

~~~
frogpelt
Your doubts may be well founded but there have been many examples of public
figures who vocally and publicly denied any wrongdoing when mounds of evidence
pointed to them being guilty. Jerry Sandusky comes to mind.

------
natecavanaugh
I tend to take it for granted that third party services can and will delete
everything you post whenever it suits them, or even just because whoever is
running the data management is inept or uninterested in a sane backup policy.
But that might just be because I "grew up", digitally speaking, in the era of
self-hosted websites and blogs, of FTP and local development pushed remotely.
It does seem that the entire system is now designed around always trusting
some other service for managing our data, so I wonder if this will continually
influence users to trust an illusion, and a far harder to understand mental
model of what is "mine", "ours" and "yours". Maybe it'll all course correct
itself, with services baking into their models personalized data recovery and
management, or at least a more sane model of data ownership. But I do think it
will take more issues like this, instead of just the "death by a thousand
cuts" that is happening now when your spouse wipes out all of your playlists
because they didn't know they affected every device, or not knowing which
photos have been synced and which haven't because your cloud storage is full.

Sometimes all the magic starts feeling a lot less like Harry Potter and more
like Pee Wee's Big Adventure.

~~~
rpgmaker
> But that might just be because I "grew up", digitally speaking, in the era
> of self-hosted websites and blogs, of FTP and local development pushed
> remotely.

That's because you're technically proficient, hardly the case for most people.
For example, the blog in question seemed to be art oriented. I think that
today it's very easy for anyone to host and setup a blog for a couple of bucks
a month but few things can beat the convenience of just signing up on
blogspot.

------
_Codemonkeyism
Again we're in a sad state when people with tools at their fingertips can't
see them and think if Google doesn't offer a blog service, there is nothing
they can do.

------
d--b
Mmmmh, as long as it's not clear what the violations were, it's useless to
discuss whether or not Google was in their right to shut down the account.

This is just a reminder that public publishing follows rules, and if you want
to bend the rules one way or another, this is what may happen to your
account...

~~~
sandworm101
>> if you want to bend the rules one way or another, this is what may happen
to your account...

We don't know if the blogger did anything wrong or not. The blog is gone and
we don't have a good statement from Google as to why. It may have been removed
in error. It may have been a request of some sort by a third party that google
is covering. We assume that Google thinks a rule was violated, but we don't
know whether it was a proper decision by Google people, or a 5-second decision
by a subcontracted moderator service. Or it may have been a completely
automated decision not involving any human beings. All we can do is speculate.
But that reliance on speculation, the lack of proper transparency, is a
perfectly valid criticism of Google.

------
jake-low
Some discussion here [0] from when the story appeared on Fusion [1] a couple
weeks ago.

[0]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099757](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099757)

[1]: [http://fusion.net/story/325231/google-deletes-dennis-
cooper-...](http://fusion.net/story/325231/google-deletes-dennis-cooper-blog/)

------
paulpauper
It bears repeating, always have back-ups of everything. Store a version on the
'cloud', on an external hd, and on the hard drive of your computer.

maybe one of those 'ads' were underage or something

Google is notoriously Orwellian and Kafkaesque in their TOS so I think he's
out of luck. It would be a nice guesture if they just gave him back his data
though. I don't think that's too much to ask

------
joesmo
“We are aware of this matter, but the specific Terms of Service violations are
ones we cannot discuss further due to legal considerations.”

Bullshit. They're lying like most other companies in similar positions (Amazon
comes to mind). There is no TOS violation. Whatever their reason for closing
the blog, it's certainly not because of anything written down. Neither the TOS
or the TOS violation actually exist. That's why they won't say anymore.

This is a classic Internet company technique. For no reason, just shut off
access. The user has no recourse. I guarantee the money this guy spent on a
lawyer is a waste. I just hope he can change the logins to sites that use that
email so he doesn't lose all his other accounts because of this.

Without regulations like we have for other utilities, these companies have
free reign to fuck up people's lives for arbitrary, unknown reasons. Exactly
as they like it.

------
mxuribe
Maybe to sandworm101's point there was automation occurring here. Google
certainly dives into AI...maybe they have an experimental AI back-end service
to try and catch things which might be considered "offensive"...and in this
case perhaps it failed...but google does not want to publicize any failure of
its AI to avoid whatever future promotional plans it has int store for such
tech. But that of course is kind of a conspiracy theory. I guess/hope the real
reason comes out into daylight.

------
blowski
Why don't they just give him the content, so he can host it somewhere else?

~~~
flipp3r
Because distributing child porn is not legal?

