William A. White advocated lynching the Jena Six

An Internet service company has pulled the plug on its most controversial customer, a Roanoke white supremacist who used his Web site to suggest that six black youths be lynched.

Global Web Solutions cut off service to William A. White on Sunday, after receiving complaints about White's online commentary on the so-called Jena Six case in Louisiana, company owner Randy Armbrecht said Wednesday.

White has since restored the Web site, although not all of the previous links have been updated.

In a posting last week, White published the names and addresses of six black youths charged with assaulting a white classmate in Jena, La., along with the words: "Lynch the Jena 6."

The FBI is investigating whether that broke any laws -- a decision that Armbrecht said he has already made.

"Upon investigating the complaints, our interpretation of some of the content he had on the site was that it was of a criminal nature," Armbrecht said.

White confirmed that his site, Overthrow.com, went dark for several hours Sunday after Armbrecht's action.

White said he is relying temporarily on Internet services run by Hal Turner, a white supremacist in New Jersey.

He said he plans to create his own data center and have telephone lines installed so he can operate his site independently in the future.

Despite Armbrecht's interpretation, White continued to stand by his "Lynch the Jena 6" comment, noting that even some of his critics have acknowledged he is probably protected by free-speech rights.

The founder of the American National Socialist Workers Party, a Roanoke-based neo-Nazi organization, White routinely posts on his Web site inflammatory and racist comments about issues of local and national interest.

His comments about the Jena Six case have been perhaps his most controversial.

The small town of Jena was in the spotlight last week when thousands of protesters turned out to decry what they called the unfair treatment of six black high school students charged with assaulting a white classmate.

The assault was one of many altercations that followed an incident last summer in which nooses were hung from a tree on the Jena High School campus. The nooses appeared shortly after a black student requested permission to sit under the tree, long considered to be the exclusive gathering spot of whites, according to media reports.

Critics complained that the black students were treated more harshly than the white ones who hung the nooses. As last week's rally drew national attention, White posted what he said were the addresses, and in some cases the telephone numbers, of the six youths.

If the six were acquitted, White wrote, "We'll mail directions to their homes to every white man in Louisiana if we have to in order to find someone willing to do justice."

Those comments went too far for Armbrecht, who said he has continued to do business with White over the past few years despite receiving some complaints about Overthrow.com.

The policy at Global Web Solutions, which is based in the Richmond area, is to afford First Amendment protection for unpopular or objectionable views, so long as they don't amount to illegal threats or other crimes.

Because White has his own Web server, Armbrecht said he had no control over the content of Overthrow.com in their business relationship, which was to provide White an Internet protocol connection for a fee.

"At no time during the time we provided IP service for Mr. White have we agreed with the views expressed on his Web site," Armbrecht said.

Although Armbrecht said he was not concerned about being held liable for the language on Overthrow.com, he said terminating the service was "the right thing to do, given the circumstances and the verbiage we saw on his Web site."

As private companies, Internet service providers are free to chose whom they do business with. Many of them prohibit more than just illegal content, raising the bar to include material that is considered racist or in poor taste, said Marilyn Mayo, co-director of the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism.

But it's not very hard for someone like White to find a more permissive host, Mayo said.

For example, Turner's Web hosting business describes itself as "a private membership organization for straight, white, non-jews."

"Often, sites are routinely shut off by web hosts as 'hate speech' or because they are deemed 'offensive' or 'racist,' " a link to the site states. "We're changing that! We will pretty-much take web sites covering ANY (lawful) topic!"

Meanwhile, federal authorities are continuing to investigate whether White's online activities were lawful.