In the last few days, the world has witnessed a battle over free speech taking place on the web, courtesy of Wikileaks. The saga that has been dubbed as one of the most controversial collisions of politics and new media has pushed several pundits and services to turn their backs on Wikileaks. With more than a quarter of a million diplomatic cable releases last week, Wikileaks’ followers depleted but its remained a hot topic, with plenty of readers still interested in Wikileaks’ activity.

Among the first to block Wikileaks is the online retail and storage giant, Amazon, where their site was hosted.  Paypal keeps a good distance by discontinuing the Wikileaks account, while Visa suspends payments to the organization.  Another blow to Wikileaks fortune is the attempts of other companies to follow this trend, to avoid being caught in the crossfire.  When it involves politics, more often than not, it will hit the headline and attract massive attention and/or scrutiny from both the aggravated party and the public.

But, it is not a total rapture for the non-profit organization that publishes submissions of anonymous documents and sources; they still have Twitter and Facebook.  Facebook has released an official statement that unless an official lawsuit is charged against Wikileaks due to intriguing revelations, the accounts will still be active.

In a Forbes interview with Andrew Noyes of Facebook in DC, he explained why the company is firm in taking a stand in favour of Wikileaks. “We haven’t received any official requests to disable the Wikileaks page, or any notification that the articles posted on the page contain unlawful content.

“If we did, of course, we would review the material according to our rules and standards, and take it down if appropriate. The mere existence of a Wikileaks fan page on Facebook doesn’t violate any law and we would not take it down just like we don’t take down other pages about controversial topics. We’re continuing to monitor the situation.”

In a separate report, the Internet Society aired its side on the issue and supports free speech in all forms. To quote a few lines from the published article:

“We have witnessed the effective disappearance from the Internet of a website made infamous through international press coverage and political intrigue.

The Internet Society is founded upon key principles of free expression and non-discrimination that are essential to preserve the openness and utility of the Internet. We believe that this incident dramatically illustrates that those principles are currently at risk.

Recognizing the content of the wikileaks.org website is the subject of concern to a variety of individuals and nations, we nevertheless believe it must be subject to the same laws and policies of availability as all Internet sites.  Free expression should not be restricted by governmental or private controls over computer hardware or software, telecommunications infrastructure, or other essential components of the Internet.

Resilience and cooperation are built into the Internet as a design principle. The cooperation among several organizations has ensured that the impact on the Wikileaks organizational website has not prevented all access to Wikileaks material.  This further underscores that the removal of a domain is an ineffective tool to suppress communication, merely serving to undermine the integrity of the global Internet and its operation.

Unless and until appropriate laws are brought to bear to take the wikileaks.org domain down legally, technical solutions should be sought to reestablish its proper presence, and appropriate actions taken to pursue and prosecute entities (if any) that acted maliciously to take it off the air.”

With important players surfacing to declare support or despise, you are either for Wikileaks or you are a foe.