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Just found this from ‘99

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/pf/p-j111299.html

Behind the Headlines
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com

November 12, 1999

CORPORATE LIBERALS TARGET CONSERVATIVE WEB SITE

If ever there was a case of Corporate America versus the Little Guy, it is the lawsuit initiated by two media giants, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, against the populist-conservative website known as Free Republic.

INTRODUCING JIM ROBINSON

In this corner is Jim Robinson, a Vietnam vet and retired software executive who was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy around 1976. But that didn’t stop him from creating a software company, ProtoSource, that was soon bringing in over $2 million a year. Yet it seemed the Fates were determined to give Robinson a hard time: by 1996, the disease had progressed to the point where he could no longer work. To make matters much worse, his wife suffered a severe stroke: her left side was completely paralyzed, and she was unable to work. It was then that the board of directors of his company, ProtoSource, asked him to step down as chairman and chief executive officer. When his one-year consultancy contract ran out, the new regime informed him that it would not be renewed. It wouldn’t be the first time a creator and founder had been betrayed by his own creation – but Jim Robinson is a hard man to keep down.

YOU CAN’T KEEP A GOOD MAN DOWN

Muscular dystrophy hadn’t felled him, and neither would this: he picked himself up off the floor and started Electronic Orchard, which marketed accounting software systems for agribusiness. In 1991, Robinson began to become interested in politics, and this naturally melded with his computer skills: he started posting articles and comments on the electronic bulletin boards maintained by Prodigy, and various Usenet groups, and in particular was active on the “Prodigy Whitewater News” board. In spite of officious attempts by the Clintonian yuppies at Prodigy to censor commentary, a group of conservatives began to make contact with each other. Some of the board’s habitués began to coalesce around the idea that the Clinton administration was rife with corruption, focusing especially on the scandals involving large contributions to the DNC by the “Lippo Group,” controlled by Indonesia’s wealthy Riady family. A cyber-community began to form around an idea that has since been more than confirmed – that William Jefferson Clinton is the most corrupt President in the history of these United States (yes, even including President Ulysses S. Grant!)

PRODIGY: THE EAST BERLIN OF CYBERSPACE

Robinson and his friends were beginning to chafe under the increasingly severe constraints placed by Prodigy on free discussion of the Whitewater scandal, then exploding onto the front pages of the nation’s newspapers. To begin with, Prodigy was one of those closed-system dinosaurs, a self-contained centrally-controlled cyber-universe modeled after the corporate entity that had founded it: You had to subscribe, and in return you were given a maze of politically correct “chat rooms,” bulletin boards, and other features. This was all controlled by omnipotent cyber-enforcers, who could silence dissidents with the flick of a button, by literally editing out speech deemed un-PC. There was no portal to the Internet. Like the residents of East Berlin at the height of the Cold War, the unhappy prisoners of Prodigy were trapped in a dreary world run by bureaucrats (albeit of the corporate variety), where conservative views were banned as “hate speech” and the colors were strictly earthtones. Conservatives and other dissidents, increasingly frustrated by growing online constraints, dreamed of making a break for freedom. Until the day the Wall came down . . .