OTTAWA — It is not clear if the mistake first appeared on a blog or flitted around in a Twitter message. But whatever its source, it swept Mark Jeftovic and his company, EasyDNS, into both sides of the storm over corporate support, or the lack thereof, for WikiLeaks.  When Mr. Jeftovic took a look at his e-mail on the morning of Dec. 3, he was surprised to find a critical comment from a customer over his company’s decision to no longer provide domain name hosting for WikiLeaks. While EasyDNS has about 55,000 customers, Mr. Jeftovic knew that the company, which is based in Toronto, did not count WikiLeaks among them.  A quick Google search made the comment less puzzling. Several blogs and Web sites had posted variations of this sentence: “EasyDNS.net has cut off DNS service to WikiLeaks.” (DNS refers to the Domain Name System, which is something like a switchboard for the Internet.)  WikiLeaks had indeed lost the support of the company that was providing the connection between the domain name wikileaks.org and the WikiLeaks Web servers. But that company was EveryDNS, a free provider based in the United States.  For the next several days and nights, Mr. Jeftovic and his staff found themselves engaged in variation of the game Whac-A-Mole. As they contacted bloggers to correct their mistakes, new online posts from several large news organizations — including The New York Times, The Financial Times and The Guardian — with the wrong name popped up. The news reports, in turn, set off another round of blogging.  “Twitter was the pulse of the whole thing,” Mr. Jeftovic said. He found that the messages there accelerated the spread of each incorrect report, overwhelming, at times, his efforts at damage control. He added: “I was really dreading getting up in the morning.”  Unlike with other suppliers who were believed, correctly or otherwise, to have abandoned WikiLeaks, its proponents made no efforts to shut down EasyDNS by overwhelming its servers. The damage was limited to vitriolic comments and calls for its customers to go elsewhere.  The controversy took a new turn after Mr. Jeftovic took his next step. A person from outside of Canada, whom Mr. Jeftovic declined to identify, approached him on behalf of a WikiLeaks consortium to help manage the names wikileaks.org, wikileaks.ch and wikileaks.nl.  Mr. Jeftovic decided it would be hypocritical to make so much noise about having not abandoned WikiLeaks and then not help the organization when asked to do so. It was time, he wrote on the company blog, to “put up or shut up.”  In an e-mail, Mr. Jeftovic said it was disturbing that companies were feeling pressure “to pull the plug, close accounts and otherwise deny service to what is, in the absence of formal legal charges against them, a perfectly legal entity performing legal activities.”  Mr. Jeftovic has agreed to host all three of the names (though the dot-org name is in an administrative limbo at the moment) on special servers isolated from the rest of the company’s servers. This has sparked a second round of e-mails.  Most of the 300 or so e-mails he is now receiving each day are supportive. But he has new critics, Mr. Jeftovic said, who are “very upset”; an undetermined number of customers have dropped his service as a result of its support for WikiLeaks.  “There’s a minority who are saying ‘You’re a traitor to the U.S.’ — which is strange since I’m in Canada — ‘You’ve got blood on your hands, we’re gone,’ ” Mr. Jeftovic said.  Mr. Jeftovic said he did not expect a significant loss of business, as he anticipates some gains from the publicity. But mainly he wants the controversy stirred up by the incorrect reports to just come to an end.  “When I think about all the different circumstances that had to line up to make this happen, it boggles my mind,” he said.
EasyDNS was criticized for dropping WikiLeaks as a client, but it was a case of mistaken identity; the service that pulled the plug was EveryDNS.net.