From: tank <tank@xs4all.nl>
Date: Fri, 2 May 1997 02:15:52 -0700 (PDT)
To: tank@xs4all.nl
Subject: Artikel about XS4ALL in New York Times
Message-ID: <199705020912.LAA11297@xs1.xs4all.nl>
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THE NEW YORK TIMES/CYBERTIMES
www.nytimes.com


April 29, 1997

By BRUNO GIUSSANI

For an ISP in the Netherlands, Controversy Is an Old Friend

AMSTERDAM -- April has meant business as usual at XS4ALL
(access-for-all), the third-largest Internet service provider in the
Netherlands.

The month started off with the XS4ALL Web site being out of reach for a
substantial portion of the European online population, and it is ending
with the provider's adding a notch to its track record as a champion of
freedom of speech.

On April 11 the Dutch Web site was blocked by the German academic
network, Deutsche Forschungsnetz (DFN), which serves about 400
universities and research organizations and provides Internet access to
a half million people. DFN acted under pressure from the Federal
Criminal Investigation Bureau pointing out the illegal -- in Germany,
though not in the Netherlands -- content of Radikal Magazine, which is
housed on the XS4ALL server.

Radikal, a left-wing underground magazine, advocates "militant and
armed interventions" to overthrow the government, and has published a
"Short guide to hindering railway transports of all kinds" -- a
handbook describing how to attack and damage tracks.

Since selectively barring single home pages is technically impossible,
the DNF action cut off all 6,000 pages on the XS4ALL servers, including
those of Serbian opposition radio station B-92 and several scientific
databases.

Thus, while blocking illegal material, the German network was also
hampering scientific work -- which DFN has been established to
nurture.  Not to mention that skilled Internet users could route around
the obstacle by using a remailing system or a proxy server located
abroad.  What's more, Radikal Magazine can be found on several dozen
"mirror sites" around the world.

Ten days later -- after being flooded by protests -- the German network
lifted the ban on XS4ALL. "An effective blockage of illegal information
has not been within the realms of possibility," Klaus-Eckart Maass, a
DFN spokesman, conceded in an interview with The Associated Press.

Now, this happened the very same week as the indictment of a German
manager of CompuServe, a leading international online service, for the
transmission of allegedly illegal materials over the Internet and as
the German Parliament opened discussions on a new multimedia law.

The new bill would place the responsibility for content on the supplier
of the data, thus Internet service providers would not be held liable
for illegal information that could pass over their wires unless they
have been alerted and "have the technical ability" to delete or block
it -- the very same scheme the German academic network found impossible
to enforce.

It was not the first time XS4ALL had been at the forefront of an
Internet skirmish.

Last September, most German ISPs blocked XS4ALL for a month after
complaints by a regional prosecutor about Radikal.  (In January Angela
Marquardt, a Bavarian socialist politician, was indicted for linking to
the banned magazine from her personal home page).

"After a couple of weeks, the censored information was mirrored on some
50 Web sites around the world and voluntarily removed by our user from
the XS4ALL server," the company's founder, Felipe Rodriquez, 28,
explained. "After the block had ended, our user put the documents back
on his page."

Along with German prosecutors, the Amsterdam-based provider has lined
up a fair list of other adversaries: the McDonald's fast-food chain,
the Serbian government and the Church of Scientology, just to name a
few.

XS4ALL's roots reach into the hacker movement. The venture started out
in 1993 "to give anyone the possibility to access the Internet." At
that time there were no commercial access providers in Holland. It has
grown into a respectable and very successful business in less than four
years, yet the principles on which it was created have not changed:
"Internet for the masses" is still its motto.  XS4ALL currently has 55
employees, boasts 21,000 subscribers and hosts some 6,000 home pages.

"A few years ago, we would have been portrayed as a band of dangerous
anarchists, bent on disrupting society," Rodriquez told the Dutch daily
Trouw. "But now they have come to see that we are nice and quiet people
really."

The company was instrumental in the creation of the Amsterdam Digital
City project, a community networking initiative backed by taxpayer's
money, and Rodriquez himself played a key role in setting up the Dutch
anti-child-pornography hotline, the first of its kind, last year.

"Before we started the hotline, Holland had a reputation of being a
kid-porn freehaven," he said in an interview last week. "We designed it
as a non-censoring form of self-regulation."

The hotline is run by Internet users and providers. Unlike Britain's
Internet Watch Foundation, the Dutch hotline doesn't censor any
information nor does it ask the provider to do so. Hotline operators
contact the author of the information and ask him to remove the
offending content.  "If the author does not comply, we report him to
the police, and he'll be prosecuted," said Rodriquez, who also is
chairman of the Dutch Providers Association.

"The Internet Watch Foundation forces the provider to remove the
illegal content," he added. "This is a fundamentally different approach
to responsibilities on the Internet. We think the author of the
information is responsible for his own actions, not the provider."

That's why XS4ALL didn't take any steps against the customer who posted
Radikal Magazine on its server. "Our policy is that as a provider we
are not in the position to judge whether this magazine is illegal in
the Netherlands, therefore we do not interfere with our users' freedom
of speech," Rodriquez stated.

"If there is any doubt about the legality of the publication in
Holland, a Dutch court of law would be the proper place to remove these
doubts," he added.

This was the case when, in September 1995, the Religious Technology
Center -- better known as the Church of Scientology -- filed for the
seizure of all the XS4ALL computer equipment "because one of our users
had put on his home page some information to which Scientology said it
owned the copyright."

The document -- the now famous "Fishman affidavit" -- is the actual
transcript of a testimony given by Steven Fishman in a Los Angeles
Court in which he accused the church of having forced him to act
illegally.

"We denied any responsibility for the content on our users' pages; they
decide for themselves what they will publish," Rodriquez recalled. "We
won the litigation." The user preferred to take down the controversial
document.

Yet when violation of the law is flagrant, XS4ALL doesn't hesitate to
comply, as it did a few weeks ago when it shut down a customer's home
page called Neuroroom, which sold marijuana and other soft drugs in
Holland and abroad.

The company's commitment to support free expression and democratization
of the Internet doesn't stop here. Last fall when the Serbian
government censored radio station B-92, XS4ALL helped design an
Internet campaign and started to carry news broadcasts (in RealAudio
format) that kept the rare opposition voice alive and the international
public informed through independent accounts of the events occurring
during the mass demonstrations in Belgrade.

"They gave us disk space, donated network traffic and helped in
training people," said Frank Tiggelaar, a Dutch activist for
democratization in former Yugoslavia.

"Basically any project we like gets free resources from XS4ALL,"
Rodriquez commented.

The campaign of Helen Steel and Dave Morris is among the projects
XS4ALL's old hackers do like. The two British environmentalists are the
main characters of a civil case that started in 1990 when the
McDonald's restaurant chain sued them for distributing flyers pointing
at what they called the company's economic and ecological "ravages."

The trial is not over yet -- but it has spawned a large Internet-based
support network and fed a huge anti-McDonald's Web site called
McSpotlight hosted, not surprisingly, by XS4ALL.

EUROBYTES is published weekly, on Tuesdays. Click here for a list of
links to other columns in the series.


Related Sites Following are links to the external Web sites mentioned
in this article. These sites are not part of The New York Times on the
Web, and The Times has no control over their content or availability.
When you have finished visiting any of these sites, you will be able to
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Bruno Giussani at eurobytes@nytimes.com welcomes your comments and
suggestions.


		Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company


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Managing Director  -                           - pub pgp-key 1024/A07C02F9