Two important alternative voices on the Internet, Wikileaks and P2P.net, have both announced that they need to temporarily shut their doors. With server costs in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, one can assume that advertising and donations didn’t quite bring in enough to keep things running.
This is an important reminder that speech online is not free–especially if you have something interesting or important to say. I’d argue that, these are perfect arguments for Internet Neutrality. If providers were allowed to shift to a scheme where they can charge sites like this extra for access, one can only imagine how many other ideas might be chilled.
Who knew that, in an age of thinking about how we might fund newspapers, we might also need to think about how alternative voices are funded online as well.