It’s hard to imagine these days, but remember back in the nineties when the web started to go mainstream and all sort of not very IT aware companies took their first baby steps on it? Remember how quite a few of those companies just didn’t understand linking and how some of those tried to get their lawyers to forbid socalled deeplinking, wanting to gain control of whoever was linking to them and requiring them to only link to their homepage, rather than “deeplinking” to a specific page on the site? Well, it seems in some remote corner of Belgium it’s still 1995, as the national railways have forbidden links to anything but their welcome page (in dutch).
Specifically, the NMBS doesn’t like it when you link to this page (Dutch), explaining how you can get compensation when your train is delayed. At least one blogger who linked to this page got a cease and desist letter for their troubles (Dutch again). Very likely the NMBS doesn’t have a leg to stand on, but I’m not a lawyer and the chilling effect is bad enough. Even if a blogger could win a lawsuit, the question is whether they could afford one. It’s all deeply silly, symptomatic of a company that doesn’t understand the internet or why they should be doing more with it.