I came across this Guardian article describing how an American author and artist found his Google account deleted, including his 14 year old blog hosted with Google’s Blogger platform.

To me this incident is notable in a few ways.

• The author concerned had his blog up for 14 years, and even used it to write and keep manuscripts, so clearly it was of key importance to him as an online asset.
• For such a key asset, using a free service is a risk, as that doesn’t provide any certainty concerning uptime.
• Blogger, as a free service, comes with a TOS, allowing Google to withdraw service at any moment. You don’t have a ‘right’ to this service.
• After the account was closed, it was impossible to actually contact Google to ask about the why and how, or if it can be reinstated
• The author concerned feels he’s being censored (which in a literal sense is impossible, as only governments can censor), although it is likely the account was closed because of a breach of the terms of service (which are notoriously unevenly enforced in every platform)
• The author didn’t keep back-ups.

All of this once again highlights the importance of embracing the distributedness of the internet. You have to make sure that you are not just a passive and consuming part of it, but that for things that are important to you, you are also willing to make sure those things are under as much of your own control as possible. Your blog is only yours if you have control over the infrastructure it runs on. The same is true for e-mail, which in the case mentioned above was also lost: you have to make sure you have full control over at least one domain name, at which you can also receive and send e-mail (you@yourdomain.tld).

This in short means you need to make sure you have a claim to the service you actually need. Blogger offers free hosting but can take it away. If you want your blog to exist, make sure you pay for hosting, and make sure you run it on a domain you control. I used Blogger when I started blogging in November 2002 (around the same time in short, as the artist’s blog that was deleted), but once I realized I was likely to continue writing, after a few months, I moved it to a paid hosting package I could more fully control, and on a URL I acquired separately from the hosting, also under my full control. It doesn’t mean nothing can happen (my blog was hacked once), but it does mean I can recover from it.

The web was built in distributed fashion. If you use it in a centralized way, by making use of large centralized services, you expose yourself to vulnerabilities. That is true for centralized free blogging platforms, like Blogger.com or WordPress.com, and all those other services such as Facebook, Flickr and whatnot. Don’t make yourself dependant, don’t put yourself in a position that has a single point of failure.