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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

No, their mistake was being lazy. They did not effectively explain their application of the terms of service and how, specifically, his post violated those terms until far too late in the process. [1]

At first all he got was "your post violates section 2.8: harassment, defamatory content, etc.". If just anyone can claim harassment and have a blog shut down for any reason with no review that would be a serious issue for customers that wanted to host content on Digital Ocean. He said "please explain how this violates your terms of service" and it wasn't until several mails later in the exchange that he finally got a barely adequate answer (by my standards).

Now, maybe in legal/asshole world, a service provider is not obligated to explain to a user in a reasonable fashion how the ToS has been violated (or even discouraged because that would make them liable for some bullshit or another). But in the human world, such neglect is a gross violation of customer service. If you are a potential customer of Digital Ocean, "friendliness" is not the takeaway from how they handled this.

The key issue is the risk of a service provider shutting you down because someone complained about your content. No one, no matter what sort of content they host, wants that risk if they can avoid it. From that perspective, the distinction between "Editorial Control" and "Threat of Account Termination for violation of section 2.8" is most definitely nitpicking.

[1] Note, of course, that we are seeing only one side of the story here. There may be unpublished emails that address my accusations that DO was lazy (although I don't personally believe there are)

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.

They handled this badly, and they'll pay for it, however small the impact.

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!

I think exposing what people say in the open (not private but also not quite public) isn't exactly something someone who works at google should be complaining about. If "stuff you do online can come back to haunt you" shocks you then you probably shouldn't be working at google (except perhaps as a contractor with no benefits, right?)

Whose the other asshole?

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.

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?

As usual, it's difficult to discuss this when there's no distinction between first-amendment style free speech and the general concept of it and various interim consequences.

A site like Digital Ocean is a general-purpose hosting provider. As a general-purpose provider, their perspective on censorship and free speech is important to anyone who would be a customer of their service. "How are they going apply their ToS?" is a legitimate and important question to any user of their service. Will they be rigorous and fair? Or Will they be biased towards people who complain? Will they be biased towards certain political factions? Will they be biased towards the whims of their executives? When they apply their ToS, what recourse will you have? What is their appeal process like?

In other words, it's a "free speech" issue in the sense of "is Digital Ocean's behavior and policy adequately permissive for the content I want to host?"

This guy clearly crossed a line with the content and tone of his blog post.

How do you 'cross a line' with tone? If I am looking for a hosting provider, I am not looking for one who takes a complaint at face value, then scans my content carelessly trying to get a feel for the 'tone'. I want a specific, incontrovertible infraction that is fair and explained to as precisely as they are able.

Honestly this guy seems like a jerk to me and just from the two posts I've seen I don't like him. But it doesn't matter how I feel, it matters whether he violated the terms of service (both the letter and the spirit).

What does an individual do at a time like this? It seems his solution is to try to rally up people in anger and emotion against DO.

This is really the issue here. The hosting provider should err on the side of its customers as opposed to random third parties. There are a lot of edge cases on what can or should be legally hosted. The hosting provider may have the legal right to take down controversial content, but it's an absolutely cowardly thing to do. The free speech-friendly approach would be to side with its customers UNTIL the third party has obtained a court order that the content be taken down, rather than insist that their own customers get a court order insisting that the content stay up.

Maybe they do. This is a fairly clear case of online harassment. The guy acted like bully and it shows in his post. All they wanted from him was to remove references to his name. This is fairly standard - for example, Reddit frowns upon identifying people in certain stories because they had issues with vigilante mobs forming.

At any rate, bullying generally isn't illegal. Neither is naming names. In order to be legally actionable, harassment usually has to get to the point where there's some threat of violence or some pattern of behavior. As far as I can tell, there has been exactly one blog post about this guy (two if you include the post about DO) about some conversations in a chat room that's open to the public. That's not harassment. Were it otherwise, every blog that mentioned Justine Sacco should have been taken down.

Reddit is a community with its own social norms. I have no issue with Reddit policing itself in a manner to create an environment welcoming to others. But DO is a service provider! They may have the legal right to do so, but I don't expect them to be making value judgments about my (lawful) expression, anymore than I expect Comcast or Gmail to.

I don't care though: all of those things are well-within the law. If DigitalOcean's TOS means that they personally police content, then I'm out.

Let that sink in, because your comment is calling out the OP for being a jerk. You are making claims, legal claims, such as "he harassed a guy" as if they he was already guilty of the crime of harassment.

This kind of fracas, though - in which ONE person is able to fabricate a story and exercise tyrannical control via proxy - dissuades me heavily from that. Maybe if I were to use DO, one of my competitors could trump up some charges and persuade them to drop my "droplet"? Do I want to deal with that possibility?

Hell, I feel nervous just posting this here, now! Who knows what they'll do to me in the future based on this text! (/me copies this post, logs out, creates new user id.)

This leads me to think that in terms of "digital society," we are still behind Hannurabi's Law and even Sharia Law. We are in the Wild West and power in the form of oligarchy is the rule. I hope more of us geeks read up on their philosophy. [1]

[1]http://www.philclassics.libsyn.com/

Welcome to the bottom of the pile, DO. It could have been magic.

Basically, it's as if Amazon threatened someone's account on AWS because someone posted an article about something Jeff Bezos actually said.

>Basically, it's as if Amazon threatened someone's account on AWS because someone posted an article about something Jeff Bezos actually said.

Jeff Bezos is the founder, CEO and the public face of one of the biggest corporations in the world. This Googler is not Jeff Bezos. He's just a developer, one of thousands at Google. There is a difference here.

DO - TOS is like a slander clause

Yes it is, it's relative to the laws of a given country what is considered slander and what is not.

> I am saying that they are perfectly within their right to enforce their TOS how they see fit

There are laws around slander and DO has no right to enforce them, because last time I checked vigilantism was illegal.

> If the OP doesn't agree with them, there is nothing that says he can't move his content to another provider that may not make the same decision DO has.

How easy or hard to move his content is irrelevant, the fact is he paid for a service which the provider terminated citing unproven(innocent until proven guilty) claims based on a one liner email from some random person on the internet.

It is not vigilantism because DO is not threatening to throw the poster in jail over an allegedly illegal act. They are simply enforcing their contractual rights.

You could argue that this is a breach of contract, and that the poster must be shown in court to have defamed someone before the contract is terminated, but note that the section of the TOS that DO cites also says that the poster cannot "harass or embarrass" someone. That's pretty vague and gives DO a lot of leeway to argue that the poster breached the TOS. It's a pretty crappy TOS to be sure, but I wouldn't bet money on the poster winning a court case here.

> the fact is he paid for a service which the provider terminated

This makes it sound like they just shut down his account, when in fact they communicated with him, telling him exactly what he would need to do to bring his content into compliance with their TOS, at which point he would presumably have continued access to his account. At this point, it would be his choice about whether to continue his relationship with DO, or to move to another provider.

Relevant links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigilantism

There are laws regarding defamation, I don't think DO can just opt in to enforce them. They can write anything in their TOS, wether or not it's legally enforceable is another question.

This varies by jurisdiction.

You are generally free to speak with someone and report it.

And they are terminating a service that the OP paid with it's _own_ money. There are consumer protection laws.

> Is there a law stating that they don't have a right to do this?

They don't have the right to enforce the law, they are not the police, and as it turns out there are laws against slander.

If you get court order to take a page down do that - probably because it is illegal. IMO the more drama the more your business is visible. For one I heard very good things about Digital Ocean - however I am very libertian minded and I think whatever people go going between themselves - they should figure it out. If things turn criminal let police deal with it.

Ethics matter to me. And they matter to many people. This guy is pure bully and I feel bad for the Googler. I'm glad DO stepped in and politely asked him to anonymize his post.

Here's a major reason why Digital Ocean was unethical: they took unilateral action based on a complaint from some googler transmitted to a highly placed Digital Ocean executive who the googler knew personally. If that's an acceptable resolution to someone being mean to someone on the internet, then is Digital Ocean going to provide the entire world with personal access to this executive, in case one of their customers is ever mean to anyone else? No. So it's a recovery only available to privileged technocrats.

This is by no means the only reason why Digital Ocean's action is unacceptable, but it deserves more consideration. Google itself is well known for being impossible to deal with unless you know someone on the inside. This googler should carefully consider whether he was really the wronged party here, or whether he is part of a larger problem.

I have no connection to this Googler, to author, to Google or to DO. Believe it or not.

>they took unilateral action based on a complaint from some googler transmitted to a highly placed Digital Ocean executive who the googler knew personally.

They took unilateral action because they own the service, and maybe they took this action because it's quite evident what happened just by reading his post.

And all they did was ask him to remove identifying information, that's it. That's a very prudent and reasonable request. Reddit, for example, had major issues with vigilante groups forming after some inflammatory posting which also named some private individuals. More often than not, it led to innocent people being harassed. I've just re-read the original post, and it's a total personal attack against a private individual for no good reason. This bully went so far as to find out where the Googler lives.

The entire conspiracy theory around the fact that some DO executive may or may not know the Googler personally and that's why all this happened, is just some hand-waving speculation. I don't know anyone at DO and I don't know this Googler, and yet, I think this was the right move.

Yes. Digital Ocean is just providing his VPS. Why should they be involved at all? If i say something about Scientology are they going to kill my VPS because they happen to like Scientology? What if i criticize anti-vaccination supporters?

But look at what you just wrote. That complaint has been raised against Google many times, because Google's index captures not only what you say in public, but what others say about you, even if you feel that it is misleading. For example, if a news story comes out about me being implicated in a crime, and 1 week later, I'm completely exonerated...but whoever wrote the headline used poorer SEO, and fewer people cared 1 week later...Google, via algorithm, may rank the outdated story higher.

There's very little recourse because, on technical grounds alone, it is tricky to do. But in a "moral" sense, once you make that move for someone, how do you argue that you don't do it for someone else in a similar situation?

The Googler spoke in a place that would not legally be considered private and he is not naive about technology. Is the OP a jerk? Sure. But that's not the topic here....the topic is, would Digital Ocean have been a jerk to say "Sorry buddy, but we can't just take a blog down because you regret your comments"?

IMO, No. And it's not because DO is a jerk. Anymore than Google is for not taking down clearly harmful -- but not illegal -- results. As Matt Cutts put it:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/remove-page-from-google/

> *Unfortunately there’s not much I can do. The page you pointed out is not spam, and pretty much the only removals (at least in the U.S., which is what I know about) that we do for legal reasons are if a court orders us. We typically say that if person A doesn’t like a webpage B, only removing page B out of Google’s search results doesn’t do any good because webpage B is still there (e.g. it can be found by going to it directly or through other search engines). In that sense, the presence of that page in Google’s index is just reflecting the fact that the page exists on the wider web....There you have it. People usually aren’t happy to hear that reply, but I hope they can understand the reasoning behind it.

So if you're talking about ethics, what DO did here, IMO, crossed a line, because now it sets a very low bar for what is privacy and what is defamation. If the OP quoted the Googler correctly...and the Googler offered his opinion knowing that it was being read...he may not like how his comments were interpreted or published, but he doesn't have legal recourse.

For the record, "off the record" has no real legal standing. It's a term reporters use to set the boundaries with their sources...if they break it, then it's unlikely sources will talk to those reporters again. In this case, of course, the Googler can exercise that right to not speak to the OP again. But it really shouldn't be up to DO to intervene on his behalf in such a ham-fisted way.

What does have to do with anything?!