For now, there's little legal basis for shutting down Rotten.com. The Child Online Protection Act has been struck down by the federal courts. (It is currently under appeal at the U.S. Supreme Court.) But that doesn't mean that Rotten.com is in the clear: Threats to its existence are coming from other places.

The new target for offended moral guardians is the Internet service provider: Send enough self-righteous, horrified letters to an ISP, and you'll convince a Web site's upstream provider to remove it from its servers. Where laws fail to govern -- or censor -- the Internet, the market might succeed.

Luckily for Soylent, there are still enough independent ISPs looking for business that he can find a home. After Rotten.com was ejected by one ISP, Soylent found a smaller, independent provider with anti-censorship principles. As a result, Rotten.com has been able to take other controversial sites under its wing, like BonsaiKitten, which came to Rotten.com for help after Humane Society activists forced two ISPs to drop the site from their servers.

Soylent insists that he isn't worried about losing his Internet access. In fact, he says he's regularly approached by ISPs that offer to host Rotten.com should he lose access again. Even if that fails, he says, "I could always take it overseas, where the laws are less severe." France and Germany may disapprove of him, in other words, but perhaps Barbados wouldn't.

But as Internet access continues to consolidate (AOL Time Warner now controls Internet access for millions, while rumors circulate that Microsoft may soon buy Earthlink) and as small ISPs are snatched up by bigger ones, it's becoming clear that more and more Internet users are accessing the Net through service providers owned by conservative media giants -- any of which could silence sites deemed offensive in an instant, if enough shocked parents spoke up.

As Cohn puts it, "You don't have a right to an ISP, and though they can't discriminate against you based on race, they can certainly say, 'We only want clean or Christian Web sites, and we can kick you out.'" In that scenario, the First Amendment offers little protection to sites like Rotten.com; if the ISP decides to kick them off, they may have nowhere else to go.

Even if Rotten.com and its ilk do survive ISP consolidation, they'll still have foreigners to worry about. A recent Yahoo France case -- in which Yahoo was forced by French authorities to remove all hate paraphernalia from its auction pages -- has free-speech activists alarmed that the Net is going to be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator of acceptability. Similarly, a German court recently ruled that German laws (again, focusing specifically on banning Nazi propaganda) could be applied to Web sites that are hosted by foreigners in other countries.

With these rulings in hand, foreign governments have been the first authorities to chase after Rotten.com. As British newspaper the Observer reports, Scotland Yard and the FBI are currently investigating Soylent's culpability in a recent Rotten.com image depicting a man eating a baby (a charge that Soylent counters by arguing that the photo is a doctored image created by a Chinese artist). The image provoked one Scotland Yard detective to say that he wanted to shut down the Web site. (The FBI did not return phone calls requesting information about the case, and Soylent says he has yet to be contacted by authorities.)

Meanwhile, the German Family Ministry recently began sending threatening letters to Soylent, complete with color printouts of "offending" images from his site, insisting that he must shield his "youth-endangering writings" from German minors. Although he has yet to receive a legal summons, Soylent is not allowed to advertise in Germany, he says. "And minors cannot download the Web site from Germany or I could be prosecuted."

It's highly unlikely that the American government would allow Soylent's extradition to face charges overseas, but it's still something that free-speech lawyers are watching with consternation. "This is a logical extension of the Yahoo France case. Once Germany can say that no Germans can see this, everyone else will do the same thing, and it will end up with a race to the bottom. If you take this to the logical extension, we all end up with speech fit for Afghanistan or China -- the most repressive governments you can think of," Cohn says. "Essentially ISPs, in order to try to protect themselves from this, will begin screening people as to location. So if you're American you can only see the sites that are American-friendly, and if you are Chinese you only see Chinese sites, and we lose something true that the Internet gave us all."

It's possible, of course, that if this worst-case scenario comes true, someone will step up and create a haven for the horrible: an ISP that is willing to take risks by hosting Rotten.com and other sites considered offensive, if not obscene. With BonsaiKitten under his protection, Soylent is already building a kind of mini-refuge for persecuted sites. As BonsaiKitten founder Wong Chang puts it, "The cross-publicity benefits both of us, and his generosity in protecting us from censorship raises his esteem in the eyes of those who understand what the first freedom is all about."

In the meantime, Soylent is continuing his life's work of assembling a database of bizarre images. He's planning a book about freaks and anomalies, and plans to build a more historical database online. He regularly receives phone calls from the Discovery Channel and the Learning Channel requesting access to his photo library, and he's even contributing exhibits to a new Los Angeles tourist museum -- appropriately, the Museum of Death. He continues to revel in his role as the beloved and reviled poster boy for voyeuristic horror.

As he slyly asks me before he heads off to the bookstore to do some more research, "I'm not so scary, am I?"

This story has been corrected.

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