Bowing to pressure from the Dow
Chemical Corporation, the Internet company Verio has
booted the activist-oriented Thing.net from the Web.
Internet service provider Thing.net has been the primary
service provider for activist and artist organisations
in the New York area for 10 years.
On December 3, activists used a server
housed by Thing.net to post a parody Dow press release
on the eighteenth anniversary of the disaster in which
20,000 people died as a result of an accident at a Union
Carbide plant in Bhopal, India. Dow now owns Union
Carbide.
The deadpan statement, which many
people took as real, explained that Dow could not accept
responsibility for the disaster due to its primary
allegiance to its shareholders and to its bottom line.
Dow was not amused, and sent a Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaint to Verio,
which immediately cut Thing.net off the Internet for 15
hours. A few days later, Verio announced that Thing.net
had 60 days to move to another provider before being
shut down permanently, unilaterally terminating
Thing.net's 7-year-old contract.
Affected organisations include
PS1/MOMA, Artforum, Nettime, Tenant.net (which assists
renters facing eviction), and hundreds more.
"Verio's actions are nothing short of
outrageous," said Wolfgang Staehle, Thing.net executive
director. "They could have resolved the matter with the
Dow parodists directly; instead they chose to shut down
our entire network. This self-appointed enforcement of
the DMCA could have a serious chilling effect on free
speech, and has already damaged our business."
Please visit https://secure.thing.net/backbone/
to help Thing.net survive Dow's and Verio's actions, and
to develop a plan to avoid such problems in the future.
You can make a
donation to Thing.net.
(Source: RTMark, which
publicises corporate abuses of democracy, and which is
also housed on Thing.net. For more details contact: thing-group@rtmark.com)
Related stories:
NGOs
Spar over Removing Toxic Wastes in Bhopal
(OneWorld.net)
Other
stories in the media
More
news stories
Other resources
Bhopal.net
Bhopal.org
Make
a donation
Keeping
an eye on Dirty Dow
Carbide’s
poison papers
Survivors’
testimony
Mercy for the
Martyrs of Bhopal!
by Dominique Lapierre
Resources
for campaigners
Documents
of Bhopal
case
