WikiLeaks' Main Site Is Down — and the Internet Routes Around It

This week, the world's governments and largest corporations ran an experiment: can you delete a website from the internet? The answer, so far, is no.

On December 1, Amazon Web Services terminated WikiLeaks' hosting contract — reportedly after pressure from U.S. officials. The next day, the organization's domain registrar, EveryDNS, pulled its DNS registration, knocking wikileaks.org offline. The site resurfaced under a Swiss domain, wikileaks.ch, as volunteers spun up mirror sites across dozens of countries and jurisdictions. Within days, hundreds of mirrors were circulating through WikiLeaks' Twitter account and supporter networks.

The payment processors joined the blockade. PayPal froze WikiLeaks' donation account this week; Visa and Mastercard would follow. The financial cutoff was arguably more effective than the technical takedown — an organization's ability to operate depends on money moving, and the money rails turned out to be more centralized, and more vulnerable, than the web itself.

The episode illustrated a fundamental asymmetry of the internet era. Centralized services — a hosting provider, a DNS registrar, a payment processor — can be pressured by governments into dropping a client. But a distributed network of mirrors across dozens of national jurisdictions cannot be removed simultaneously without a degree of international coordination no coalition could assemble in real time.

The information, once released, could not be recalled. That much was settled this week. What remained open was the harder question: whether an organization can survive when the infrastructure of money, unlike the infrastructure of information, still has chokepoints — and who gets to decide when those chokepoints close.