Will this blog be online a hundred years from today?
For almost two weeks now, we at The Wire have been dealing with a complaint that someone from Maharashtra lodged against us with Amazon Web Services (AWS), our sites’ host, for allegedly copying one paragraph in one article sans consent from a source that the complainant allegedly owns, and thus violating AWS’s terms of use and becoming eligible – if found guilty – to have the offending webpage taken down. The paragraph is not plagiarised (I edited and published it) but the alleged source of the ‘original’ material is shady, and there’s reason to believe a deeper malice could be at work, as I’ve explained in an article for The Wire.
The matter is still unresolved: the AWS abuse team has been emailing us almost every day asking us to tell them what we’ve done to ‘address’ the complaint, ignoring the proof we sent them showing that the article couldn’t possibly have been plagiarised (we shared the Google Doc on which the article was composed and edited from scratch, with date and timestamps). The abuse team remains unsatisfied and would simply like us to act, whatever that means. From my point of view, it seems like AWS doesn’t have the room to consider that the complaint could be baseless. I also think that any organisation that doesn’t know or want to deal with editorial complaints shouldn’t receive editorial complaints in the first place. Otherwise, you have a situation in which an unknown private entity can allege to a tech company that one of its clients has violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) – the overreaching American legal instrument that is the principal blunt weapon in this episode – forcing the tech company to bear down on the client to make the problem go away, without pausing for a moment to think if it’s been conned into becoming an agent of harassment. But why would it, considering so many tech companies registered in the US actually benefit from the overreaching character of the DMCA.
(It’s doubly ridiculous when these agents are Indian and based in India, and who may not be aware of the full story of the DMCA but are required by their contracts of employment to enforce it.)
The awfulness of this entire episode, still ongoing, strikes to me at the heart of questions about who gets to access the internet and how. The AWS abuse team has told us on more than one occasion that if the matter isn’t resolved to AWS’s satisfaction, they will have to remove the offending webpage from their servers. Obviously we can find a new host, but whichever host we find, the problem remains: one of the many mediators of our access to the internet, starting from the internet service provider, is the entity hosting those websites. And not just any entity but a predominantly American one, and therefore obligated to enforce the terms of the DMCA. I don’t have to point to any numbers to claim, safely, that a vast majority of the internet traffic today pings the servers of websites hosted by AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. Recently, Tim Bray blogged about what the consequences might look like if the biggest of AWS’s 24 datacentre “regions” – called simply us-east-1 – went offline. It would be an unmitigated catastrophe.
