> I yearn for the days when the Internet was truly open. When was that? Back in the early days, ISPs and hosts would shut down sites with very little provocati

> I yearn for the days when the Internet was truly open. When was that? Back in the early days, ISPs and hosts would shut down sites with very little provocation. I remember big outcries around sites being taken down by their ISP and/or having their domains seized by the FBI for file sharing and/or hate speech. In fact, you could argue that the internet is more resistant to censorship now than it was back then. The ISPs in the early days had fewer customers and more competition, making them vulnerable to bad press. They pretty much had to act on any crank who complained about objectionable content hosted on their servers. ISPs today are bigger and have de facto monopolies (TWC and Comcast), so they don't respond so much to bad press. While that may be bad news for customer service, it's good news for the conspiracy theorist who wants to discuss which Rothschild is behind 9/11. Also, ISPs don't have to take sites down as often as they used to because most of them are hosted through third party companies like wordpress and google (blogspot).