Regardless of how the hosting provider feels about the content they're hosting, it's very unprofessional to terminate a contract so absolutely with no warning. They could have easily given the site a few days, if not weeks, to migrate to another service, but they instead chose to immediately kill not just the hosts of voat.co but all of the hosts under the account, which included an entirely unrelated blog with scientific papers.
I find it scary that so many commenters find this to be a natural course of action for a hosting provider to take. A hosting provider caring about what I host, other than whether or not it's legal, is just as absurd as my ISP caring about what packets I send (once again, other than the legality of them). While a hosting provider's role isn't nearly as "utility" as an ISP, it's certainly close and I would be appalled if the majority of hosting providers actually took stances like this. A minority is to be expected, no different than a book publisher only publishing Christian books, but if the average book publisher was expected to publish only Christian books, I would be quite frightened.
(3) The Client may not infringe statutory prohibitions, moral
standards or the rights of third parties (copyright law, trademark
law, rights to the name and data protection law etc.) through his use
of his website or the banners that appear on the website. […] In the
event of any infringement of one of the aforementioned obligations,
the Provider shall be entitled to suspend the provision of his
services with immediate effect or to block access to the Client’s
information.
So hypothetically hosteurope.de could take down almost any fashion blog or picture of a woman hosted on their servers because in Saudi Arabia it is illegal to show a woman's body?
Yes, a bit facetious but the point is that such a 'moral' clause is so wide that it can be misused at will. What is moral for one person may not be for another and what's moral in one society may not be in another.
Beyond that, it must be noted that hosteurope.de did not cite this as their reason. They did not use the 'moral' clause but their exact words were 'politically incorrect'.
Yes they could if they choose to. So just don't use them for your hosting if you have such concerns. I know I wouldn't choose them (though I'm not exactly in the market for a hosting company at the moment)
I have slight doubts that the German company wrote to the Swedish user based in Switzerland in English.
Personally I suspect hosteurope pulling the plug has more to do with the neo-Nazi forums and borderline child porn. (Voat operates by Swiss laws on legality of porn, which allow stuff Germany doesn't.)
It is possible that Voat is spinning this to make themselves look good. Also, they want more donations.
Can you please cite hosteurope.de's ToS where it says that their clients content must be "politically correct" and that "politically incorrect" content will result in an immediate revocation of the account?
I find it scary that so many commenters find this to be a natural course of action for a hosting provider to take. A hosting provider caring about what I host, other than whether or not it's legal, is just as absurd as my ISP caring about what packets I send (once again, other than the legality of them). While a hosting provider's role isn't nearly as "utility" as an ISP, it's certainly close and I would be appalled if the majority of hosting providers actually took stances like this. A minority is to be expected, no different than a book publisher only publishing Christian books, but if the average book publisher was expected to publish only Christian books, I would be quite frightened.