Akamai has decided to jettison its customer, Al-Jazeera, for reasons it won’t talk about. Al-Jazeera is, of course, the Arab satellite news channel. It had asked for help from Akamai in dealing with hackers and general server overload.

It’s hard to imagine that this is anything but a political decision by Akamai. As many have pointed out, one of Akamai’s cofounders was on one of the flights that was crashed into the World Trade Center, so it is understandable that this is an especially sensitive issue for Akamai. But Arabs are not terrorists and Al-Jazeera isn’t Al Qaeda.

I know Al-Jazeera isn’t an objective source of news, but it’s a real good way to see how much of the world is seeing what CNN is presenting to us in unabashedly jingoistic terms. I’d rather have multiple points of view than just one, even if that one could be known to be the “best.” Akamai’s decision detracts from the Net’s value.

(Thanks to Paul Lehrman for the links to two MSNBC articles, here and here.)

Categories: Uncategorized dw