The Democratization of Censorship Link

For those unaware, one of the highest profile security researchers and bloggers was hit with the largest DDoS attack in history. It was so massive that it impacted Akamai and they removed support for his website, which is a dramatic accomplishment that may portend an unwelcome future for the internet and free speech.

Today, he has a follow up post The Democratization of Censorship:

John Gilmore, an American entrepreneur and civil libertarian, once famously quipped that “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” This notion undoubtedly rings true for those who see national governments as the principal threats to free speech.

More than 20 years after Gilmore first coined that turn of phrase, his most notable quotable has effectively been inverted — “Censorship can in fact route around the Internet.” The Internet can’t route around censorship when the censorship is all-pervasive and armed with, for all practical purposes, near-infinite reach and capacity. I call this rather unwelcome and hostile development the “The Democratization of Censorship.”