Google deletes artist’s blog, a decade of his work

Fully agree with your comments, but I fear we're going in the wrong direction with the silo-ization of the web and the decline in open standards being ratified and used by large companies.

Just look at Google's hostility towards maintaining standardized IMAP/SMTP support for third party mail clients. Google Apps and Office 365 would drop IMAP access to their services in a heartbeat if they could.

Furthermore a lot of our online interactions are moving from open formats like Usenet, IRC, XMPP and SMTP/IMAP to closed off walled gardens like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

This artist's online presence could have been entirely based on Instagram and Twitter for example and I bet many (younger than I) folks nowadays do eschew email for other forms of communication.

I don't think self sufficiency in communication is a problem the end user can be realistically expected to solve. It's up to engineers and technology stake holders to try and push us back to a more open way of using these apps and provide standards based communication.

I don't know how the heck we'll do that - I don't see any user pressure for companies to even try, but news like this troubles me and I think it's going to get much worse before people realize their data isn't their own and push for it to get better.

It's NOT like that. Rather Chad already sold it all off to Craigslist and informed the owner after the fact.

If Google was a storage facility and did this, free or no, they would be liable.

Friendly reminder that your stuff is not "backed up" in the cloud unless you have a local copy. Otherwise it just lives in the cloud, meaning it lives on someone else's server.

Why not just get a stable, world-reachable[1] IP address? All the services you use have them. You can too.

When you have your own, then you can run your own "services", not to mention many other possibilities, such as true decentralized communications -- no third party servers needed.

1. "World-reachable" means you control the firewall, not a third party.

Alternatively, be satisfied and keep depending on third parties.

Google: "Let us make many consecutive requests to your webserver, download and store copies of your content." You: "Agreed." You: "Let me make many consecutive reuqests to your webserver, download and store copies of my own or other people's content." Google: "Sorry".

Then Google makes your content available to others, but only for a few searches at time[2]. To add insult to injury, it sells advertising and, if the regulators are correct, promotes its own websites -- all serving user-generated content -- as people are searching through publicly available information.

"Middleman" or "service"?

2. Any attempt to collect in bulk results in IP ban. Compare Internet Archive who encourages users to crawl their collection.

Organizing public information sounds like a lovely goal for a company, until you realize it will be access controlled (it's public information), laden with ads (because the company cannot support itself without advertisers), user tracking for the advertisers and that the changes to the algorithms that include or exclude results are secret. And there will be no index. You can only access the data through search.

Moving beyond the first page of results is OK only so long as you do not go "too fast" or go too deep -- you will never get to page 100 witout first being banned. WTF?

It's more than just Google, it's the whole tech press that pushes the glorious cloud future without covering these kinds of caveats. A big selling point of the cloud for average people is that supposedly they don't have to worry about having to protect their data as professionals will do it for them, but then these incidents come out and there's these "I told you so" where apparently they always need a self-hosted version as well.