The soul of the Internet saved: Activism paid off!

I received a mail from The Pirate Bay (TPB) legend and hero Anakata this morning. He informed me that TPB effective immediately is lifting their blockage of users from Swedish internet operator Perspektiv Bredband.

The reason is that Perspektiv Bredband has now realized that their decision to block their own users from Russian music download site AllofMP3.com was premature and wrong and not in line with how an Internet operator should behave.

"We made a premature decision and deviated from our mission. I regret this. The management agrees with our new chairman of the board that limiting access to content on the Internet is not within the scope of our business", says Fredrik Winbladh, CEO of Perspektiv Bredband (where their press release is published today in Swedish).

"It is of great importance that we, as a telecom and Internet provider, focus on transmitting information. Our standing could be questioned if one looks at the position we took, something we cannot risk. The company and its management has learned a lot from the debate that has taken place", says new chairman of the board, Mikael Paulsson.

This is a very important development and a victory for Internet freedom and activism and I will argue why here and describe what was going on in the background.

The soul of Internet = unbroken, and unfiltered communications between end users. A horizontal way of communicating. This threatens existing powers that built on centralized control and vertical communication. Politicians, mass media, Hollywood, pop stars: all of them sent their messages down to a passive mass of receivers, consumers and couch potatoes.

And then came Internet. The content industry applauded! Hooray! Pipelines directly into the living room of every family! Just connect your credit card to our content delivery service and here we go! Profits galore!

But he kids did not behave in that way. Not even the family fathers behaved in that way. They had tasted the new freedom that opened up, the freedom of connecting directly to others without intermediaries or gate-keepers. The freedom of telling your friend: I heard this amazing song, I love it, listen, get the file here! They saw nothing wrong with sharing information. They started to see ownership of information as a fiction. They felt that sharing of information was actually the soul of Internet.

Those who lived well from the old paradigm hate this new world. It takes away power and (maybe) profits from them, at least if they continue behaving in the old way. They try to control end-user behavior. Hollywood and the record industry terrorize Internet users all over the world. They try to ruin them, throw them into jail, threaten them, blackmail them. But users just continue behaving according to the new paradigm.

When this does not work, they invent other ways: In Sweden MPA hired a lawyer who was a class-mate and close friend of Thomas Bodström, the Minister of Justice. The U.S. administration also demanded from the Swedish government that they must shut down The Pirate Bay, or face trade sanctions. The government obeyed and ordered a raid on The Pirate Bay, although the chief IT prosecutor shortly before that had produced a long memorandum explaining that according to Swedish law, TPB did nothing wrong.

On May 31, 2006 65 police-men performed raids in at least 10 places simultaneously and carried away at least 120 servers, belonging to customers of Internet and web hosting provider PRQ, whose owner had been identified (by a Hollywood hired private investigator!) as the Pirate Bay legend known as Anakata. They decided to wipe out his company and ruin him, because of his purported involvement in The Pirate Bay.

Well, they did not know Anakata's determination: Two days later The Pirate Bay was up and running and was now bigger than ever, because of all the free publicity. And the Swedish Pirate Party got a boost and has now sparked parties in many countries.

So what are the old powers going to do? Try to enforce filtering at the operator level! According to several sources Perspektiv Bredband was pressured by IFPI, the anti-piracy organisation of the record industry, to block AllofMP3.com and publicly announce that they, as an operator, were proud to take a stand.

Yes, the content industry is very disturbed by the telecoms and operators who simply see themselves as neutral transmitters of whatever information that the users choose to communicate. They want the operators to serve as centralized gatekeepers. They sue them or threaten to sue them for being "accomplices" in copyright infringement.

It seemed like they managed to drive in a wedge into the operator community in Sweden with the case of Perspektiv Bredband. I wrote about it and called the firm a "false Internet operator" that did not in fact give access to the Internet, but only a subset that they deemed acceptable. I communicated with their CEO. So did, more importantly of course, many of their customers. And so did Swedish activist organisation Piratbyrån, who also launched a campaign together with the Pirate Bay to block all the users of Perspektiv Bredband from accesssing sites on the net. They put up instructions for how to implement the blockage.

For this they were criticized but I cannot agree: This activism was at the end-user level. It is not the same thing for an end-user to say "You cannot access my site" as for an operator/access provider to suddenly determine what parts of the net people should have access to. Power has shifted from the center to the periphery, to the end-user. This is fine!

The unified operator front against pressure from the old vertical communications gate-keepers was broken by Perspektiv Bredband. This was a threat to Internet freedom and the soul of the Internet and it had to be fought.

Lo and behold! All this activism, pressure, questions, writing, blogging, opinion-making, digging, blocking, publicity, and finally, I guess, customer outrage paid off. Perspektiv Bredband has shown strength when they change their ways and wants to join the community of real Internet operators again. The front is unified and the soul of the Internet is alive and kicking.

Only the users can keep that soul alive and in order to do that they have to take a stand. That's what this story teaches us.

Comments

[Christopher Kullenberg]

As I have mentioned before, Internet end-users are because of the de-centralized and self-recovering nature of the infrastructure growing into actors to count on seriously. When ISP's, governments or other centralized organizations try to gain control, there is an instant resistance from the users, and of course from their social organizations such as TPB. This may not be a triumph, but rather a tour de force and a lesson for companies to learn before trying to supress something that will react back.

[Urban Sundström]

Thankyou for a nice blog-entry in English. I am one of the Internet users who sent an e-mail to the support at Perspektiv Bredband. I am happy they changed their mind.

Regards, Urban

[kdsde]

now, if ifpi.se will try to get a swedish court to force perspectiv to censor the internet like stupid denmark courts have done over there, will the internet community in sweden stay side by side with the ISP and will they fight (with legal means only, no violence against ifpi and the people behind it of course!) with the ISP for freedom of information and horizontally comunication?

[Rasmus]

I think the strategic lesson to be learn is about the importance of making the small steps troublesome enough to be possible to really dispute - which was what The Pirate Bay's counter-blockade did.
One could also think about it as introducing "friction" on a slippery downward street.

Some more strategic thoughts (in Swedish) at Copyriot

[JörgenL]

To Urban Sundström: The court descision that the danish court took, can't really happen in sweden, since the swedish copyright laws are explicitly removing the temporary copies that are necessary to make in the network infrastructure from copyright.

I think any smart ISP's would fight for all they are worth to avoid the position that they in any way are counted as responsible for the content they transport.

Anyone not doing that basically accepts responsibility for the content of the whole internet...

That is such a preposterous thought I am quite certain that a higher court will overrule the danish ruling as well.

All the same, ISP's can be attacked from other actors, like the media, wich has happened historically, but that has always up to now been criticism for the additional content services that the ISP's have had, like news servers etc., and in my view that is something quite different. What Perspektiv did was actually to block the transport to a specific IP-address, and that is far more serious that not having some news groups on their news server or not looking up addresses in their DNS.

Those are services that easily can be obtained from other sources, but to actually block the transport of packages to a specific address is something that the subscriber can't work around in a simple way.

Now, I don't think media is on the side of the "moralists" any more. That phase is mostly in the beginning when a new technology is emerging, today the media is less prone to take that position, but it could happen out of ignorance I think. Journalist as well as the public in general are not really aware of the consequences of trying to regulate the net in these ways, and there we have a mission, to enlighten the masses of what could happen.