Yes, of course I went from private school library to municipality, that is my whole point. Censorship is not always infringing upon peoples' right to free speech, yet it is still censorship, i.e. the suppression of anything considered objectionable. When practiced by a minority it is simply annoying, but when it's institutionalized it's damaging, because *then* it detracts from free speech.

Once censorship becomes an infringement, though, it's a bit late to address the problem. Instead, we need to keep our eyes open and avoid it while it's still just annoying, particularly when the writing is on the wall, as it were...

You have a point, ceoyoyo, but I don't think it's a very good one. Your point is that the cloud's servers are private, so the owners are free to use them any way they please. Certainly that is true, but this doesn't exclude the fact that they are censoring content if they disallow the sharing of material that they have, alone, whimsically determined to be "offensive." The building metaphor is persuasive, but misleading--a building is not an information medium. Graffiti is offensive, indeed a crime, not because of its semantic content but because of the paint. A more apt metaphor would be that of a private school library refusing to shelve Salinger's "Catcher in The Rye" because it offends the librarian. He has every right to exclude anything from his library that he likes, but it's still censorship.

The argument that I can share my material elsewhere, like here at Slashdot for example, doesn't change the fact that the cloud owners are censoring content, it only changes the *effect* of the censorship. A sophomore in the private school can always get "Catcher in The Rye" in a public library, or buy it himself. If, however, municipalities ban the book from their library shelves, and then private bookstores prefer not to stock it for fear of offending their customer base, then we have a problem. A bunch of yahoos burning books in a parking lot is pretty harmless, but if the yahoos are the majority or the authority then it becomes frightening. Somewhere in between "harmless" and "frightening" is cause for alarm--the question is, where?

I raised the point (hardly a rant), because I believe that there is some cause for concern here. First, the very private companies that market their clouds have, in the past, colluded with governments in order to censor content. Clearly, for the people of China, this is bad--the equivalent of the "frightening" scenario above. One may argue who cares, we don't live in China, but our own federal government and some states have moved or are planning to shift their information services to privately owned clouds. So ultimately, even here in the USA, a private cloud can actually be public.

That is why we should all be wary of censorship on private cloud computing platforms.

"Censorship" is the proper word to describe this. The notion that I cannot express myself except in some "inoffensive" manner, for whatever values of "inoffensive" are acceptable to the owner of the cloud. I can see the "great wall cloud of China" already. Haven't big search companies already kowtowed to the Chinese government in order to access their markets? Is it inconceivable that Google would agree to Chinese government review of shared documents in order to serve the Chinese "cloud computing" market? I don't think it is.

Even here, imagine trying to write almost any kind of literary critique of Henry Miller, Ferdinand Celine or Vladimir Nabakov...