(Some more background on the Flashback censorship issue) Paul ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2003 01:08:20 +0100 From: Zenon Panoussis <oracle@provocation.net> Cc: Kurt Erik Lindqvist <kurtis@kurtis.pp.se>, batz <batsy@vapour.net>, nanog@merit.edu To: Paul Wouters <paul@xtdnet.nl> Subject: Re: NYT on Thing.net Paul Wouters wrote:

Perhaps Zenon (Whom I cc:ed just because he knows the details) can shed some more light on this.

I hosted and am still hosting a partial mirror of the old Flashback, including the nazi site that caused the controversy, I know Jan Axelsson personally and I got the story mainly straight from him. Whether this makes the story more accurate or more biased is an open issue for you to decide. In any case, much of the correspondence between Axelsson and the upstreams, as well as between Axelsson and the authorities, rolled out on my fax at some point. All the paperwork I saw corroborated Axelsson's story and none contradicted it. In the first round, Björn Fries, a social-democratic city council member in Karlskrona, demanded that Flashback would remove the nazi site. Flashback refused and advised Fries to report the site to the prosecutor. Fries did so, but he was not the first one; others had filed reports too. The prosecutor found no reason to act. Fries, claiming that he was acting as a private individual and as a social-democratic polititian but *not* as a city council member, turned to Flashback's upsteam and demandedaction against Flashback. In fact, he did so on the letterhead of the city of Karlskrona and had the city lawyer do all the paperwork. The upstream (Air2net?) basically shrugged their shoulders. Fries went to the upstream's upstream while at the same time he mounted a broad and rather populistic media campaign in which all the issues were blurred down to "the nazis are bad". At approximately the same time, some corporations (notableSE Banken) stated to the upstream's upstream (I am almost sure that was UUnet, but I can't swear on it) that they would only use the services of "nazi-free" providers. The top upstream gave an ultimatum to the bottom one and the bottom one told Axelsson that they were extremely sorry, but it was either Flashback off the air or Flashback *and* the upstream off the air. Flashback was cut off. In the second round, Axelsson went shopping for connectivity. He got the one quote after the other with the standard "we will be pleased to welcome you as a customer", but shortly later the one ISP after the other backed off until none was left. At this time, at the initiative of Fries and through letters written by the Karlskrona city lawyer, the Swedish association of ISPs (I forget its name; something like the Dutch NLIP, a non-mandatory, non-regulatory private body in which all major and many minor ISPs are represented) took up the issue. At first they issued some kind of statement saying that they had all agreed to refuse nazi content and anybody carrying it. Later they took that back and refused to comment. Since they are a private body, nobody can force them to show their minutes (and nobody has leaked them so far). The end result was that not one single ISP was willing to host Flashback and Axelsson got a rather remarkable collection of subterfuges, "not in, he'll will call you" from people who never called, unreplied letters and the like. In the third round Axelsson mounted his own media offensive and attacked the ISPs, the city of Karlskrona and Fries himself. He filed complaints with the competition authority (the Swedish NMa) for the agreement of the ISPs across competition borders to boycott him, demanded stacks of public documents from Karlscrona, complained to the national ombudsman against the city exceeding the statutory limits of its authority and against Fries for using the city for his "private" campaigns. The affair became pretty big, to the extent that questions were asked in parliament and the prime minister,who previously had congratulated Fries for his "courage in the fight against nazism", had to weasle his way out of a possibly hot spot. Part of Flashback was hosted in Holland. The anti-trust complaint was not investigated (lack of evidence). I don't know the outcome of the other complaints. In the third round - or rather in the break - Axelsson got some "throwaway" connectivity from someone who didn't care if he would get cut off. Flashback went back online and stayed there for two days before it was cut off again. In the fourth round, more than a year later, Axelsson dumped the web hosting, got connected, and put his main site and the webfora online. No static nazi websites, no big problems. There must have been nazi entries in the discussion fora, but there is usually so much opposition to them that the whole ends up being quite the opposite of nazi promotion. * In effect, the one website that caused all this never made it back on the air in Sweden. The partial and partially fucked-up mirror of the original Flashback is still available from my server in the Netherlands. Most Swedish nazi sites have moved to the US and many have bundled their efforts in nazi portals, where they have better and cheaper technical resources and get help with better design, ending up with much better sites than their original make-a-site-while-drunk-in-the-garage variants. They can show the finger to people like Fries and to the whole Swedish establishment and they feel, rightly, that they won this fight and have come stronger out of it. The big loser in all this is the Swedish democracy. Cheerio. Z