A backbone without a backbone

Don't you just love living in a free country, where you're allowed to write and think what you want, even if it offends some totalitarians at your old high school that you haven't set foot in for 17 years? Oh, wait...

I wasn't going to dwell on my high school years on this blog, but they asked for it.

For those who don't know me, here's the background: For 11½ years, I've had a dialup account with a certain small, local ISP. For years I never had trouble with my account. This despite the fact that I have an extensive webpage that lampoons the living shit out of my former high school. It mentions this school by name, which is kind of sharp. And for the past 14 years, I've run The Last Word, a newsletter that pretty much does the same (in addition to running lively editorials on current events). When I got my website at this ISP, I began posting The Last Word there.

In 2005, I authored a book titled 'The Fight That Never Ends', which describes violence and harassment I suffered in middle and high school. I have post-traumatic stress disorder from what happened in my youth, and a vast majority of the harassment happened at that particular high school. The book, however, doesn't refer to the school by its real name. My website provides links to order the book.

The school in question is a Catholic school in northern Kentucky, just outside Cincinnati. I went there the first 3 years of high school and was expelled because some asshole poured ink all over my sketchbook in the art room and used the spilled ink to write crap about me, and the principal accused me of "conspiring" with a teacher to investigate to see who did it. How this was wrong on my part (or even on the teacher's part), I'll never know. Later, the school claimed the expulsion was because I had punched the guidance counselor. But this was an out-and-out lie.

All that school ever does is lie. (Apparently they told other students I had punched the guidance counselor, so the school does more than just lie to the person they're lying about.) The school also extorted several hundred dollars from me, mostly for textbooks that were stolen from me because the school refused to replace the lock for my locker (which had mysteriously vanished). It's hard to believe there's a school that bad, but of all the schools I went to, that was positively the worst.

After high school, I made it my mission to counter the school's garbage, often with humor and biting insight. My readers encouraged me for years to keep doing it, so I did.

I know the school complained to my ISP about it (because the school complained to several individuals who linked to my site), but I never said anything about the school that was untrue, so my ISP never censored my site or told me to remove the offending articles.

Early this year, however, my ISP began farming out its dialup services in my area. Thus its customers in my area no longer used most of the ISP's equipment. ISP functions were contracted out to the local phone company or a big backbone network. So what I was now getting when I dialed my ISP was just its name on some corporation's modems.

Finally, last month, The Last Word opened with a blistering article about my former high school, because it appears to be the first school in the whole nation to acquire a network of surveillance cameras that transmit live video directly to police cars. This was likely the most scorching piece I've ever printed about the school. If any parents who were considering sending their kids to this school had read it, they would have been soundly freed of that notion. Trust me on that. I would bet you that some even pulled their kids out of the school after reading it. The part about how the school aided and abetted an illicit relationship between a female student and an adult man had to have hurt enrollment.

But what I printed was the truth. I wish I had mentioned that matter earlier, but I had forgotten about it for years. (For reasons I'm not getting into, I had put the whole thing out of my mind.) I knew I was taking a big risk with my Internet account by charging the school with something so serious (even though what I said was true), but I couldn't let it go. I knew the article would get to them, and I knew they'd consider it a serious threat to their nicey-nicey world, but, by golly, I was standing by what I said.

Fast forward to Wednesday, August 29. That night I tried to log on to my ISP. But lo! My account didn't work! I then tried logging on to my ISP's shell service - but instead of the name of my ISP, it came up with the name of the backbone provider! My account didn't work on the shell service either. (It said my username and password were "invalid.")

I'm 95% sure my high school complained about my new article and the backbone provider yanked my access. I know I didn't go over the monthly time limit that the phone company imposes, because that's not how it acts when that happens, and I was very frugal with my time online. (If it was due to the time limit, it wouldn't have taken all the way to September 2 to reset my hours, unless the phone company is even more incompetent than I thought.) It's possible my high school had nothing to do with the loss of my access, but painfully unlikely.

I'm damn mad, but at least I had steeled myself for this prospect - the prospect of being at the mercy of a careless backbone provider and the disgusting cretins who run my old high school. I've been at the mercy of the latter for 20 years, as I still wake up almost nightly with the flashbacks of what happened there. If I was 100% sure my high school was behind this censorship, instead of just 95%, I would be seeing them in court for harassment.

So I had to get a new ISP. I called the new ISP right away, and they said it would take 8 days to come by to install the cable modem. Meanwhile, I was losing business while I was offline - another loss my high school is apparently responsible for.

But today my old ISP account started working again! This indicates the ISP didn't restrict my access, but its backbone provider did. As long as my ISP wasn't the party responsible for pulling my access, I don't point the finger at my ISP. So with my new ISP account still looming, I'm going to have to decide which ISP I want to keep. (My new ISP is high-speed, not dialup, but I always trusted my old ISP not to censor my site.)

I will not let the liars from my school win. Even if The Last Word went down, I planned on bringing it back. If I had to buy my own domain to host it free of censorship, I would have.

Assuming my high school is indeed responsible for the loss of my access, this proves once again what a bunch of freedom-hating little shitbags the people who run it are. These are evil individuals, and they want to do bad things.

This whole saga also underscores what a Big Lie it was when boosters of the Internet portrayed it as the ultimate democracy. If some school run by ultraconservative freaks can almost bring down an entire publication that has 14 years behind it just because it had the "wrong" opinion, that's dictatorship. It also shows why the government needs to regulate Internet corporations to stop this censorship from happening. (And why it needs to put my high school out of business.) If a backbone provider blocks you for having a website that criticizes your former school, that's no different from the phone company disconnecting you for a conversation with a third party in which you criticize the school. Also, my ISP never would have had to farm out its operations if not for the predatory practices of some of its much larger competitors, which the scuzzy government (in all its malice) has failed to control. (What the hell are we paying taxes for?)

So that's another failure of yours, free marketeers. What is it with the free market (free racket, rather) and failure?