[Air-l] <nettime> Thing.net press release re Verio/NTT (fwd)

robert m. tynes rtynes at u.washington.edu
Fri Feb 28 14:18:12 PST 2003


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 21:36:04 +0100
From: brian at thing.net
To: nettime-l at bbs.thing.net
Subject: <nettime> Thing.net press release re Verio/NTT

February 28, 2003

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
THING.NET REMAINS ONLINE WITH NEW PROVIDER;
SEEKS GREATER INDEPENDENCE

Contact: thing-group at rtmark.com
Contribute to Thing.net's independence drive at
https://secure.thing.net/backbone/

As has been widely reported in the press, NTT/Verio, Thing.net's upstream
service provider, recently informed Thing.net that it would unilaterally
terminate its service contract. While the original date given for the cutoff
was February 28, it is now timed for March 14, 2003. In the meantime Thing.net
has signed with other providers to assure continued connectivity and will
remain safely online.

Socially and politically critical groups and artists with similar concerns
continue to feel the chilling effects of unfounded legal threats from large
corporations, who currently believe they can intimidate an ISP simply by
complaining to the upstream provider. As C. Carr reported in the Village Voice,
"technically, what's happened to Thing.net is not censorship. It's worse. 'What
we have here is something that doesn't even go to court,' says Svetlana
Mintcheva, coordinator of the Arts Advocacy Project at the National Coalition
Against Censorship. "'They were just preemptively closed. It sets a kind of
precedent where corporations can take away free speech, no matter what kind of
First Amendment protections we have, and there isn't much to be done legally.'
Verio reps declined to comment."

Thing.net plans to fight such actions by working to achieve more independence
from censorious upstream providers. Thing.net is in dialog with European ISPs
about relocating some of its "mission-critical" elements there. "The advantage
of this approach is that the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) doesn't
apply there and the European Union just failed to get a majority for a
similarly flawed law," says Wolfgang Staehle, Thing.net Director. "This will
provide greater security with no compromise in service."

Since an article in the New York Times on December 23, 2002, Thing.net has
received many donations from individual and institutional supporters around the
world, in addition to international press coverage. Among organizations that
have contributed or promised to do se are The Nathan Cummings Foundation, the
Open Society Institute, the Warhol Foundation, and the Creative Capital
Foundation.

http://www.thing.net
https://secure.thing.net/backbone/
http://bbs.thing.net
http://thing.net/switch

Background:

In addition to terminating their contract with Thing.net, NTT/Verio took the
dramatic measure, in response to legal complaints about a parody web site, of
shutting down the entire Thing.net network for fifteen hours on December 3-4
virtually without warning. This affected web sites for such organizations as
Artforum and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (and many more), seriously
compromising Thing.net's service to its clients.

The shutdown stemmed from a complaint by Dow Chemical Corporation over a web
site created by artists' collective RTMark that parodied Dow and was hosted by
Thing.net (http://rtmark.com/thingpr.html). Dow invoked the intellectual
property and cybersquatting provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
(DMCA) - a law that is regularly used by corporations to prevent free speech -
in demanding that the site be taken offline.

NTT/Verio, in turn, claimed to be obliged both to shut down Thing.net and to
terminate their service under the DMCA. When NTT/Verio was unable to contact a
representative of Thing.net during the evening hours, they shut down the entire
network - rather than just the parody Web site - and subsequently threatened to
terminate their service to thing.net.

"Thing.net is a commercial ISP with years of solid service," says Wolfgang
Staehle, Thing.net Executive Director. "Verio's arbitrary and punitive
interruption of our services has made us look unstable and inflicted serious
damage to our reputation."

"What Verio has done," asserts Ray Thomas of RTMark, the group responsible for
the Dow parody site, "is like a phone company cutting off a whole neighborhood
for one prank phone call."

To receive donations for the expenses associated with the switchover and for
building a more secure network, Thing.net has set up a donation page at
http://secure.thing.net/backbone/.


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