Italian version
.art
30.12.02 Verio threatens to close The Thing.
According to a notice released by RTMark, the provider Verio, yielding to pressures made by Dow Chemical Corporation, caused by a joke site against it (see the satirical site of the Dow Chemical Corporation), has decided to rescind the contract stipulated with The Thing, historic association of electronic artists and net.artists which has been active for more than ten years, spans half the world and is based in New York. Verio gave a notice to The Thing saying they have 60 days to move somewhere else all of their services, including those offered to the PS1/MOMA gallery, to the magazine Artforum, and to the Nettime mailing list. A furious (with good reasons) Woflgang Staehle, director of The Thing, has declared: "They could have resolved this matter directly with the owners of that particular site without cutting the connectivity to our entire network... besides damaging our enterprise, this action establishes a dangerous precedent for the freedom of expression on the Net". For this reason, too, the future strategy will be to manage a block of IP addresses and hosting them on different providers, to avoid similar problems in the future. The amount to pay for this project is 25.000 dollars, which the association hopes to collect through donations.