Although this guy is clearly a jerk, I'm crossing DO off my list of providers that I'm willing to use. I sometimes write controversial articles on my own website. These articles can make certain groups of people very angry and have elicited a range of responses up to and including me getting sued for defamation by two public figures (they lost). I have no interest in fighting with my hosting provider in addition to everything else, and don't expect to as long as I don't use their servers for anything illegal.
> I have no interest in fighting with my hosting provider in addition to everything else
This is really the issue here. The hosting provider should err on the side of its customers as opposed to random third parties. There are a lot of edge cases on what can or should be legally hosted. The hosting provider may have the legal right to take down controversial content, but it's an absolutely cowardly thing to do. The free speech-friendly approach would be to side with its customers UNTIL the third party has obtained a court order that the content be taken down, rather than insist that their own customers get a court order insisting that the content stay up.
>The hosting provider should err on the side of its customers as opposed to random third parties.
Maybe they do. This is a fairly clear case of online harassment. The guy acted like bully and it shows in his post. All they wanted from him was to remove references to his name. This is fairly standard - for example, Reddit frowns upon identifying people in certain stories because they had issues with vigilante mobs forming.
As someone who spent a non-trivial part of my childhood being bullied, I wouldn't call this bullying. It seems more in line with public shaming than anything else.
At any rate, bullying generally isn't illegal. Neither is naming names. In order to be legally actionable, harassment usually has to get to the point where there's some threat of violence or some pattern of behavior. As far as I can tell, there has been exactly one blog post about this guy (two if you include the post about DO) about some conversations in a chat room that's open to the public. That's not harassment. Were it otherwise, every blog that mentioned Justine Sacco should have been taken down.
Reddit is a community with its own social norms. I have no issue with Reddit policing itself in a manner to create an environment welcoming to others. But DO is a service provider! They may have the legal right to do so, but I don't expect them to be making value judgments about my (lawful) expression, anymore than I expect Comcast or Gmail to.
