nettime-nl: Effective blockade on the Internet impossible (AP newswire)

[Felipe Rodriquez <felipe@xs4all.nl>]

This was was sent in Germany on tuesday, i got the translation today:

"Effective blockade on the Internet impossible" 

Frankfurt/M, April 22 (AP)
Effectively barring information of a certain kind from
the Internet is not possible. That is the outcome of a week 
long blockade by Deutsche Forschungsnetz (DFN) of the Dutch
Internet provider XS4ALL (meaning Access for All), which was
lifted Monday evening.
"It has been demonstrated that an effective blockade of
illegal information has not been within the bounds of
possibility" said DFN spokesman Klaus)Eckart Maass to AP news
agency last Tuesday. Other Web servers, according to Mr Maass,
have set up mirror sites of the online edition of the
underground magazine "Radikal", published via XS4ALL, that 
is, it has been copied and been made accessible to the public.
But this  only served to put "Radikal" really in the picture.
Besides, he had been faced with a flood of protest and abuse
from the Internet, Mr Maass said. "Maintaining the blockade
was not feasible."

With their measure of 11 April, DFN responded to a letter
from the Federal Criminal Investigation Department, pointing
out the illegal contents of the magazine. Issue no. 154 of the
radical left wing magazine contains a "Short Guide to
hindering railway transports of all kinds" a manual
describing how attacks can be made on the tracks on which the
nuclear waste transports to Gorleben take place. On account of
the Telecoms Bill, which received its second reading in the
federal parliament on Friday, he is obliged to bar access to
material on the Internet as soon as he learns of any illegal
contents, Mr Maass explained, provided this is technically
feasible.

Protests from Serbia's opposition broadcasting station B92

As suppressing separate Web)pages is technically not
possible, DFN cut off all access to the Dutch provider, which
offers more than 6,000 different information sites among
which those of Serbian opposition broadcasting station B92 and
several others in the scientific field. "I cannot undertake
anything that hampers scientific developments", said Mr Maass.
Three DFN users complained they were no longer able to reach
archeological and other information at XS4ALL. DFN, to which
all German universities are connected, is used by about
500,000 users to obtain access to the Internet. Protests also
came from B92, as the broadcasting station found its efforts
to further the cause of democracy in Serbia thwarted by the
blockade.
In September of last year several commercial Internet
providers had already blocked XS4ALL temporarily out of
concern, so they said, that the measures taken by the law
could take on such dimensions as would endanger their very
existence. This action gave rise to fierce protests on the
Internet, but also caused XS4ALL to remove issue 154 of
"Radikal" from the server temporarily. It has not come to that
during this recent blockade.
Speaking out on the renewed blockade, XS4ALL said they were 
surprised, stating that censoring measures on the
Internet had repeatedly proved to be counter productive. "As a
provider we take the position that we cannot curtail freedom
of opinion", XS4ALL spokesman Felipe Rodriquez-Svensson said. 
If there are doubts about the legitimacy of "Radikal" in the
Netherlands, they should be settled in a Dutch court.






-- 
XS4ALL Internet BV - Felipe Rodriquez-Svensson - finger felipe@xs4all.nl for 
Managing Director  -                           - pub pgp-key 1024/A07C02F9 

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