I got an email a couple of weeks ago letting me know that Amazon was coming to my town - (Brisbane, Australia) to do a little talk about Amazon Web Services (AWS) . For those not in the biz, the same Amazon that sells books, has a separate B2B division that sells cloud services. These are servers and databases in the cloud that provide a cost effective way for start-ups and big companies to scale websites on demand.

The basic gist is that instead of buying or renting a dedicated server, you can rent "server instances" by the hour and have the quantity of servers scale up or down, intraday depending on your traffic. It's a pretty cool service, though others may be doing it better and more cheaply - (Racskpace and Microsoft's Azure to name a couple).

The room was packed and the Amazon presenter gave a good presentation with a demo on how the service works. I was surprised though, that during the Q&A at the end, the first question was "When will you have a datacentre in Australia?" The presenter shucked and jived and basically said "I don't know".

The next question was from an IT lawyer about the legal ramifications of hosting Australian content in the United States legal jurisiction. More shucking and jiving - and the presenter actually said "this question's above my pay grade". I was really proud that my Australian cohorts were asking these questions. It laid the groundwork for me to ask my question. I raised my hand, and the presenter chose me hopefully - I could tell he was praying for a technical question - he didn't seem in his element defending the legality issues. Now was my chance - "I don't mean to badger you on the legal stuff" (I did) "but didn't Amazon shut down Wikileaks at the behest of the US government?"

Immediate uproar of laughter, and the guy looked pretty unhappy. More, desperate shucking and jiving - he told us that Amazon made a statement on this, it's online - and he had nothing more to say on the matter. We all left shortly after that, but I heard people talking about it on the way out.

I didn't go there to poison his seminar - but I feel no remorse for it. If corporations are going to be treated as people in the United States - then they need to be held personally accountable for misdeeds and weasel actions.

The statement from Amazon says that Wikileaks violated the AWS terms of service because Wikileaks did not "own" the documents stored on Wikileaks. This seems particularly weasely to me. So many websites hosting with AWS have text content that they don't "own". Comments, embeds, uploaded documents, email addresses, images - the list is endless.

I hope they get heckled more about this, because they deserve it. I also hope that Paypal comes to town ...