Lakome.com

» see lakome.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Lakome published in Arabic and in French and I read neither well enough to have been a reader. What happened to it in October 2013 needed no translation. A regulator sends an instruction to the carriers, and a site a lot of the country was reading stops loading inside that country. Anyone who was online in Turkey in 2008 can parse that sentence without help.

It opened in December 2010, made by two men who had already been closed down once each in print. Ali Anouzla ran the Arabic edition and Aboubakr Jamai ran the French one. Jamai arrived carrying two banned newspapers behind him. The tagline said that freedom starts here. Within a month it was pulling forty thousand readers a day, and by April 2011, with that spring's protests moving through Moroccan cities, it sat fourth in the country's traffic rankings.

The money was small on purpose. The founding investment was about a hundred thousand dirhams, somewhere near twelve thousand dollars, and the best advertising year brought in roughly five times that. Offers of outside capital were refused, because taking them would have meant owing an explanation to someone. For three years that arithmetic held, which for an independent outlet anywhere is longer than the odds allow.

Then the whole thing came apart over a hyperlink.

~ the record ~

~ the link ~

On 13 September 2013 the Arabic edition ran a piece about a propaganda video that al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb had put out attacking the king. The article did not host the video. It linked to it where it already sat, on the website of the Spanish daily El Pais, which had published it first.

Anouzla was arrested four days later. The charges were glorifying terrorism and materially assisting it, both under the counterterrorism articles of the penal code. The indictment came down on 24 September. He was held for five weeks and released on bail on 25 October. The case against him stayed open for years after that without ever resolving into an outcome, which is its own way of keeping a journalist quiet.

~ the block ~

On 17 October, with Anouzla still in Sale prison, the ANRT cut off access to both editions from inside Morocco. The team stood up mirrors at lako.me and at lakome.info. Those were blocked within days.

No court order was published and the site was never formally banned. It simply stopped resolving for the readers it was written for, which is the cheaper method and the far harder one to appeal. From outside the country the pages still loaded, and that is not the same thing as being read.

~ what came after ~

The French edition stopped publishing. What was left of the operation drifted down the rankings below the outlets that had never been blocked, and by the middle of the decade Lakome survived mostly on its reputation rather than on its traffic.

Anouzla came back in 2018 with Lakome2, on a new domain and at a smaller scale. That one is still running. The original never returned, and lakome.com today loads a parking lander with nothing behind it.

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