You may not know it, but war is blazing away on the Internet. Perhaps you've experienced some streaming delays on Netflix or Youtube recently. You may have been caught in the crossfire.

One of the combatants is a Dutch web-hosting company called Cyberbunker. The company's home page cycles a picture of Julian Assange with the caption, "Freedom of speech...is in the eye of the beholder." But they're quick to assure potential clients that Cyberbunker is not some kind of idealistic anarchist commune. Like all good capitalists, Cyberbunker puts the customer first.

"Even though we're located in a secretive nuclear bunker, rebuking authorities regarding the rights of individuals, that doesn't mean we're cold and non-communicative to our clients," the website promises. "We hold the highest esteem for your business."

Indeed, they hold the highest esteem for almost every kind of business "except child porn and anything related to terrorism." Pirate Bay, the world's largest BitTorrent file-sharing site, is one of their clients. Cyberbunker's owners do not mind that the Netherlands and most other European countries have blocked Pirate Bay because of copyright violations.

But that's not what the war is about. The war is about spam.

Unlike Cyberbunker, Spamhaus is a not-for-profit organization. Its investigators in London and Geneva have been tracking spam and malware operators since 1988. They publish a spammer blacklist, which they distribute free to small companies and non-commercial sites. Large corporations pay a few cents per user per year, which helps them protect their customers from spam.

Dagblog.com is both small and non-commercial. We've been fighting spam ever since the blog's founding with help from organizations like Spamhaus. A couple years ago, our filters began catching some unusual spam comments. These anonymous comments did not hawk plagiarized essays or fashion rip-offs. Instead, they proclaimed, "Spamhaus a bunch of liars and criminals - Spreads slander about isps and their customers." The spammers tried to share this message with dagblog readers over and over and over. Hundreds of thousands of those comments still hang around at other sites. Google it.

It seems that Spamhaus had pressured Cyberbunker's ISP to stop hosting spammers, phishers, and malware distributors. Somebody wasn't happy about it. There is good money in spam, but of course profit was the furthest thing from their minds. This was about freedom of speech. In order to defend the right of Cyberbunkers' customers to sell whatever they want, whenever they want, to whomever they want, they spammed dagblog and many, many others.

Last week, Spamhaus finally blacklisted Cyberbunker itself. That's when the war escalated. Hackers launched the largest DDoS attack in history, temporary silencing Spamhaus and its allies. The attack was so large that it interrupted service from unrelated providers like Netflix.

Cyberbunker spokesman Sven Olaf Kamphuis acknowledged that his company was behind the attack. "Nobody ever deputized Spamhaus to determine what goes and does not go on the Internet," he complained. "They worked themselves into that position by pretending to fight spam."

In other words, Spamhaus had the audacity to accuse Cyberbunker of profiting from spammers...who were in turn profiting from companies that profit from copyright violations and academic cheating...and doing so in a way that interferes with ordinary people exchanging ideas on the web for no money whatsoever. And for this offense, Cyberbanker took it upon itself to silence Spamhaus, to literally stop the organization from publishing. I guess freedom of speech is in the eye of the beholder.

So don't be fooled by Cyberbunker's anti-authority pose. This is not some grassroots political protest or hacktivist insurgency. Cyberbunker's profiteers do not want free speech. They want unfettered capitalism so that they and their clients can make money without regard to the harm they produce. This is about greed. The rest is sham.