Here’s a story about some shadowy (nominally USian) government agency that’s going around shutting down websites it doesn’t like & snapping up the domain names.

Rankin, the Treasury spokesman, said Marshall was free to ask for a review of his case. “If they want to be taken off the list,” Rankin said, “they should contact us to make their case.”

That is a problematic system, Fitzgerald said. “The way to get off the list,” he said, “is to go back to the same bureaucrat who put you on.”

The story makes mention of the Kafka-Orwell device known as the No-Fly List. Which are a whole nother topic.

So what’s the take-way, as we say here in the modern world? That if I put up a site (such as cuba-hemingway.com, for example) whose perfectly legal content offends some Party member in the Ministry of Truth, down goes my site, period, the end, and practically speaking there’s not a damn thing I can do about it? Doesn’t give one a lot of faith in the whole “internet as the last bastion of free speech” idea, does it?

I’ve pretty much given up on the idea of constitutional rule here in the US, at least as long as we have our current corrupt administration and cowardly congress. But it would be nice if we could get back to some of the principles enunciated in 1215, at least.