Why Did Google Erase Dennis Cooper’s Beloved Literary Blog?

In the early afternoon of June 27th, the writer Dennis Cooper was working on his computer, at his home in Paris, when his Gmail suddenly reloaded and logged him out of his account. When he tried to sign back in he found that he couldn’t. Instead of his inbox, a message appeared informing him that his account had been disabled. “It was so bizarre,” Cooper told me during a Skype call late last week. He immediately checked DC’s, his blog of ten years, and discovered that it, too, had been taken down. Its splash page had been replaced by yet another message, this time from Blogger, the Google-owned self-publishing platform that hosts his site: