The Short Life of Net Neutrality

No doubt about it - power and priviledge are corrupters, no matter if you're a fitness pimp, a moss-covered education hack, or the largest online presence on Earth:

After sending the Google Help Desk a query concerning the matter, Salvato was informed that there had been complaints of "hate speech" at his website, and as a result, The New Media Journal would no longer be part of Google News. As evidence of his offense, the Google Team supplied Salvato with links to three recent op-eds published by his contributing writers, all coincidentally about radical Islam and its relation to terrorism.

Unfortunately, this was not the first conservative e-zine to be terminated in such a fashion. On March 29, 2005, Rusty Shackleford, owner of The Jawa Report, received a similar e-mail message as Salvato informing him that: "Upon recent review, we've found that your site contains hate speech, and we will no longer be including it in Google News." For those unfamiliar, The Jawa Report focuses a great deal of attention on terrorist issues and how they relate to radical Islam.

A year after Jawa was cut from Google News, Jim Sesi's MichNews.com was banished on April 12. In Sesi's case, the three pieces provided as examples of "hate speech" were articles by conservative writer J. Grant Swank, Jr., all about - you guessed it - radical Islam and terrorism.

See a trend here?

Yea, the trend is to not upset the Boeing-As-Missle Gang or the Fertilizer Bomb Boyz.

Look, I wholly believe any private entity may do and say and cover what it wants. Just don't PRETEND to be in favor of everyone's opinion and access only to slam the door when the subject matter rubs you the wrong way.