On 12/6/2010 9:29 AM, Nathan Eisenberg wrote:
How is it more or less unattractive than having one's own servers in one's own office? Lieberman and Co would simply have leaned on Mom's Best BGP (r) and Pop's Fastest Packets (r) instead of on Amazon, and the result would have been the same.
That is a possibility, though it also depends on the business mentality and AUP. The problem is, it didn't necessarily require any *leaning* and the AUP may have been enforced anyways.
That's the catch with this here series of tubes - you don't control all of the tubes, even if you're Amazon, or Giant National ISP Co, or Massive National Fiber Plant Co. The server infrastructure is the least interesting part of what happened to WikiLeaks.
Anytime you are dealing with something highly controversial, you open yourself up for technical and social attack. Your business dependencies may be inclined to disassociate themselves with you on any grounds possible; not that they disagree with you, but perhaps they don't want to be that closely associated. It does not require any leaning, notification, or even noticeable service effect for me to decide to shutdown a site/location which is controversial in nature and causing a DOS. If I sold a 'bulletproof' service, I'd have a different through process, but that's because I'd be selling such a service. I don't sell 'bulletproof', and so I'm quickly inclined to request/takedown anything which causes technical/social issues for the network per the AUP. What the Senators did was wrong, but what Amazon did may have not been due to the pressure, but strictly based on "oh, we didn't notice that, and it's violating our AUP." I'm not saying it's the case, but it does happen. I've had to have others tell me of AUP violations from time to time. Jack