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 organizations 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. (Union Carbide is now owned by
Dow.) 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 fifteen 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 organizations 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."
RTMark, which publicizes corporate abuses of democracy, is housed
on Thing.net. 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.
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