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All DigitalOcean asked him to do was to give them editorial control over his blog. That isn't a small thing to me. At a quick glance it looks like a public for

All DigitalOcean asked him to do was to give them editorial control over his blog. That isn't a small thing to me. At a quick glance it looks like a public forum (which has a bearing on how I view the ethics of the situation although even if it was private I don't think DO should act). When you are asked a question about your employer in public you are speaking for them and if you say something dumb that your company doesn't like that is your action and responsibility not someone who reports it. When I worked for a large company I used to speak (and particularly write online) very carefully except when truly in private. I also don't see any reference to anything being "off the record" so I don't see why you assume it wasn't "on the record". Would I write that article like that? No. Do I think DO should claim editorial control over it? Hell no. Maybe DO could request the blog owner provide contact details (I can't see any on the current site) so that legal action could be brought directly against them as the publisher rather than against DO. Not offering such may be reasonable grounds to have DO demand editorial changes or cease service.

jacques_chester 13y ago
> All DigitalOcean asked him to do was to give them editorial control over his blog. That isn't a small thing to me. A nitpick. They didn't ask for editorial control; they asked for observance of the Terms of Service, with the option on their side to discontinue service. Nothing in the ToS gives DigitalOcean any right to editorial control and nothing in their communications says "give us control". It's a binary proposition. Stick to the agreement, or the agreement is off.
- imdsm 13y ago
  I disagree. It seems to me that they wanted editorial control via proxy. "You change this for me or I'll delete your droplet." The thing in this which really irks me is that the staff were neither co-operative nor reasonable. If you're a paying customer, the least they could do is put the complaint into a state of investigation whilst they looked into the claim. Instant ultimatum seems a bit steep. I use Digital Ocean and like the service, but I really disagree with how they've handled this. I'm sure I won't be the only one moving providers this weekend.
  - jacques_chester 13y ago
    I understand where you're coming from, but while the shape is similar, "editorial control" and "upholding a ToS" are essentially different things. For example. Suppose instead that DigitalOcean staff wanted him to write about penguins. If they said "write more about flightless antarctic birds or we will pull the plug", they would be trying to exercise editorial control, because they'd be making positive assertions about the content of the site. And, because they had no previous agreement in place to give them editorial control, they could be rightly told to sit and spin. But that is not the situation. They have a ToS which forbids certain kinds of content and they are within their rights to terminate service entirely if the terms aren't adhered to by the customer. What they can't do is directly edit, or expect to directly edit, or otherwise direct the content. When I studied law I learnt that different things, even when they lead to identical outcomes, are different, and should be dealt with independently. If they made a mistake, it was in trying to be friendly about it, which gave a misleading impression. Sometimes legally-worded requests are best.
    - nknighthb 13y ago
      > When I studied law I learnt that different things, even when they lead to identical outcomes, are different, and should be dealt with independently. That may be true in a court of law. This is not a court of law. Insistence on treating it like one is a great example of why people hate lawyers.
      - jacques_chester 13y ago
        This is not a court of law, but the situation is still being governed by the law. Terms of Service don't exist in a vacuum.
        imdsm 13y ago
        I think there are other variables in play here. Treating it like a court of law and not like the theatre of the internet is the reason why DO have embarrassed themselves. They will definitely have lost customers other than just myself, and that has nothing to do with law. That has to do with principle. They handled this badly, and they'll pay for it, however small the impact.
- josephlord 13y ago
  "You can't publish it if we don't like it"; is editorial control. "Change this or we will take it down"; is editorial control. They asked for a specific change: the removal of the name. That seems like editorial control to me. They took the view that anything embarrassing (even if not private) about someone who is not a public figure cannot be hosted on their servers. That is an editorial policy and they are asserting editorial control. It isn't completely clear to me that he was breaching the terms. The closest part of the quoted terms is "harrass and embarrass". If it was an "or" then he would have breached them as an "and" I don't think he has unless there is further unrevealed harassment. Regardless of whether it qualifies I would have expected the clause mostly to be used for serious harassment and/or posting nude images of people rather than accurately quoting statements that they have made recently.
  - jacques_chester 13y ago
    See my reply further down. I disagree with that characterisation. I also note that asking for particular changes was a mistake. They should have stuck with "take it down or we will take it down", to avoid people making the argument you just made. If only because being seen to exercise editorial control might introduce significant new legal risks that the ToS, and its policing, is presumably meant to avoid in the first place.
    - josephlord 13y ago
      If they have the final say on whether you can publish they have editorial control. A request to take down a whole article would be no better in my view. They are entitled to have TOS that do this and apply it strictly (although I don't actually see the breach in this case but we can we assume there was one for this discussion). I don't like the article and if I was editing a paper or a website I would not publish the article in that form but DO is not a publisher but an infrastructure provider and for something that is not clearly illegal it seems highly inappropriate. However they have guaranteed that I would not use them for any public facing service or content by stepping in this way (I might consider them for testing, internal or pure compute workloads).
macspoofing 13y ago
>I don't see why you assume it wasn't "on the record". Because it's a nice thing to do when you're dealing with private citizens. We're talking ethics here, and the thing about ethics is that they can essentially be boiled down to "don't be an asshole". This blog post can seriously hurt someone who never asked for it and doesn't deserve it. Why not be a little bit fair? If you're not sure if it's "off the record", ask. If you can't ask because the party 'muted' you (!!), assume it is 'off the record' - why? Because that's the ethical thing to do. I look at this author, and all I see is a bully. It's good that you always have the presence of mind to censor yourself accordingly. Clearly the Googler made a big mistake because he didn't expect somebody to write an entire blog post from some off-the-cuff remarks he made in a chat room. >Do I think DO should claim editorial control over it? They don't. They didn't change his blog post. They asked this guy to anonymize his post because it looks like slander and defamation which is against their TOS. That's how I interpret it as well. AND IT'S THE RIGHT THING TO DO!
- leephillips 13y ago
  "all I see is a bully." I think that's a good word for him. Unfortunately, this is the way many journalists act much of the time - exactly how they create "stories" out of nothing. I guess while playing journalist this guy forgot that the didn't have the resources of a news organization to back him up, and now he has to fend for himself.
  - chillingeffect 13y ago
    Hmm. It's not really about having the resources of a news organization. The "resources" are the inertia and hard-won philosophical reasoning behind having a free press. An individual's free speech has just the same amount of weight behind it as a large organization's. So he's hardly fending for himself - he has the backing of all those who support free speech behind him. There are rather many of us. Also, if your opinion of journalists is that many of them act this way, may I respectively suggest that it would benefit you to upgrade your news sources?
    - 13y ago

jacques_chester 13y ago

> All DigitalOcean asked him to do was to give them editorial control over his blog. That isn't a small thing to me. A nitpick. They didn't ask for editorial control; they asked for observance of the Terms of Service, with the option on their side to discontinue service. Nothing in the ToS gives DigitalOcean any right to editorial control and nothing in their communications says "give us control". It's a binary proposition. Stick to the agreement, or the agreement is off.

imdsm 13y ago
I disagree. It seems to me that they wanted editorial control via proxy. "You change this for me or I'll delete your droplet." The thing in this which really irks me is that the staff were neither co-operative nor reasonable. If you're a paying customer, the least they could do is put the complaint into a state of investigation whilst they looked into the claim. Instant ultimatum seems a bit steep. I use Digital Ocean and like the service, but I really disagree with how they've handled this. I'm sure I won't be the only one moving providers this weekend.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  I understand where you're coming from, but while the shape is similar, "editorial control" and "upholding a ToS" are essentially different things. For example. Suppose instead that DigitalOcean staff wanted him to write about penguins. If they said "write more about flightless antarctic birds or we will pull the plug", they would be trying to exercise editorial control, because they'd be making positive assertions about the content of the site. And, because they had no previous agreement in place to give them editorial control, they could be rightly told to sit and spin. But that is not the situation. They have a ToS which forbids certain kinds of content and they are within their rights to terminate service entirely if the terms aren't adhered to by the customer. What they can't do is directly edit, or expect to directly edit, or otherwise direct the content. When I studied law I learnt that different things, even when they lead to identical outcomes, are different, and should be dealt with independently. If they made a mistake, it was in trying to be friendly about it, which gave a misleading impression. Sometimes legally-worded requests are best.
  - nknighthb 13y ago
    > When I studied law I learnt that different things, even when they lead to identical outcomes, are different, and should be dealt with independently. That may be true in a court of law. This is not a court of law. Insistence on treating it like one is a great example of why people hate lawyers.
    - jacques_chester 13y ago
      This is not a court of law, but the situation is still being governed by the law. Terms of Service don't exist in a vacuum.
      - imdsm 13y ago
        I think there are other variables in play here. Treating it like a court of law and not like the theatre of the internet is the reason why DO have embarrassed themselves. They will definitely have lost customers other than just myself, and that has nothing to do with law. That has to do with principle. They handled this badly, and they'll pay for it, however small the impact.
josephlord 13y ago
"You can't publish it if we don't like it"; is editorial control. "Change this or we will take it down"; is editorial control. They asked for a specific change: the removal of the name. That seems like editorial control to me. They took the view that anything embarrassing (even if not private) about someone who is not a public figure cannot be hosted on their servers. That is an editorial policy and they are asserting editorial control. It isn't completely clear to me that he was breaching the terms. The closest part of the quoted terms is "harrass and embarrass". If it was an "or" then he would have breached them as an "and" I don't think he has unless there is further unrevealed harassment. Regardless of whether it qualifies I would have expected the clause mostly to be used for serious harassment and/or posting nude images of people rather than accurately quoting statements that they have made recently.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  See my reply further down. I disagree with that characterisation. I also note that asking for particular changes was a mistake. They should have stuck with "take it down or we will take it down", to avoid people making the argument you just made. If only because being seen to exercise editorial control might introduce significant new legal risks that the ToS, and its policing, is presumably meant to avoid in the first place.
  - josephlord 13y ago
    If they have the final say on whether you can publish they have editorial control. A request to take down a whole article would be no better in my view. They are entitled to have TOS that do this and apply it strictly (although I don't actually see the breach in this case but we can we assume there was one for this discussion). I don't like the article and if I was editing a paper or a website I would not publish the article in that form but DO is not a publisher but an infrastructure provider and for something that is not clearly illegal it seems highly inappropriate. However they have guaranteed that I would not use them for any public facing service or content by stepping in this way (I might consider them for testing, internal or pure compute workloads).

macspoofing 13y ago

>I don't see why you assume it wasn't "on the record". Because it's a nice thing to do when you're dealing with private citizens. We're talking ethics here, and the thing about ethics is that they can essentially be boiled down to "don't be an asshole". This blog post can seriously hurt someone who never asked for it and doesn't deserve it. Why not be a little bit fair? If you're not sure if it's "off the record", ask. If you can't ask because the party 'muted' you (!!), assume it is 'off the record' - why? Because that's the ethical thing to do. I look at this author, and all I see is a bully. It's good that you always have the presence of mind to censor yourself accordingly. Clearly the Googler made a big mistake because he didn't expect somebody to write an entire blog post from some off-the-cuff remarks he made in a chat room. >Do I think DO should claim editorial control over it? They don't. They didn't change his blog post. They asked this guy to anonymize his post because it looks like slander and defamation which is against their TOS. That's how I interpret it as well. AND IT'S THE RIGHT THING TO DO!

leephillips 13y ago
"all I see is a bully." I think that's a good word for him. Unfortunately, this is the way many journalists act much of the time - exactly how they create "stories" out of nothing. I guess while playing journalist this guy forgot that the didn't have the resources of a news organization to back him up, and now he has to fend for himself.
- chillingeffect 13y ago
  Hmm. It's not really about having the resources of a news organization. The "resources" are the inertia and hard-won philosophical reasoning behind having a free press. An individual's free speech has just the same amount of weight behind it as a large organization's. So he's hardly fending for himself - he has the backing of all those who support free speech behind him. There are rather many of us. Also, if your opinion of journalists is that many of them act this way, may I respectively suggest that it would benefit you to upgrade your news sources?
  - 13y ago