Please forward. Please review the Press Release below for context.

Then please do the following.

1) Load the following URL in your browser, (only once;-). Or go to
www.verio.com and figure out how to contact a salesperson.

2) Go shopping. Find some NTT/Verio services that you might otherwise be
currently interested in.

3) Using your real identity, make an inquiry. A sales person will contact
you.

4) When they do, please remind them of NTT/Verio's legacy, speculate about
how they will be remembered historically, and explain why you could or
could not enter into a business relationship with them. Use the press
release below for context. Help remind them who they are and what kind of
goodwill they have created for themselves; one that they now must sell
into.

Brett Stalbaum
EDT

On Tue, 4 Mar 2003, Rachel Greene wrote:

>
> —— Forwarded Message
> From: brian@thing.net
> Reply-To: brian@thing.net
> Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 21:36:04 +0100
> To: nettime-l@bbs.thing.net
> Subject: <nettime> Thing.net press release re Verio/NTT
>
> February 28, 2003
>
> FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
> THING.NET REMAINS ONLINE WITH NEW PROVIDER;
> SEEKS GREATER INDEPENDENCE
>
> Contact: thing-group@rtmark.com
> Contribute to Thing.net's independence drive at
> https://secure.thing.net/backbone/
>
> As has been widely reported in the press, NTT/Verio, Thing.net's upstream
> service provider, recently informed Thing.net that it would unilaterally
> terminate its service contract. While the original date given for the cutoff
> was February 28, it is now timed for March 14, 2003. In the meantime
> Thing.net
> has signed with other providers to assure continued connectivity and will
> remain safely online.
>
> Socially and politically critical groups and artists with similar concerns
> continue to feel the chilling effects of unfounded legal threats from large
> corporations, who currently believe they can intimidate an ISP simply by
> complaining to the upstream provider. As C. Carr reported in the Village
> Voice,
> "technically, what's happened to Thing.net is not censorship. It's worse.
> 'What
> we have here is something that doesn't even go to court,' says Svetlana
> Mintcheva, coordinator of the Arts Advocacy Project at the National
> Coalition
> Against Censorship. "'They were just preemptively closed. It sets a kind of
> precedent where corporations can take away free speech, no matter what kind
> of
> First Amendment protections we have, and there isn't much to be done
> legally.'
> Verio reps declined to comment."
>
> Thing.net plans to fight such actions by working to achieve more
> independence
> from censorious upstream providers. Thing.net is in dialog with European
> ISPs
> about relocating some of its "mission-critical" elements there. "The
> advantage
> of this approach is that the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) doesn't
> apply there and the European Union just failed to get a majority for a
> similarly flawed law," says Wolfgang Staehle, Thing.net Director. "This will
> provide greater security with no compromise in service."
>
> Since an article in the New York Times on December 23, 2002, Thing.net has
> received many donations from individual and institutional supporters around
> the
> world, in addition to international press coverage. Among organizations that
> have contributed or promised to do se are The Nathan Cummings Foundation,
> the
> Open Society Institute, the Warhol Foundation, and the Creative Capital
> Foundation.
>
> http://www.thing.net
> https://secure.thing.net/backbone/
> http://bbs.thing.net
> http://thing.net/switch
>
> Background:
>
> In addition to terminating their contract with Thing.net, NTT/Verio took the
> dramatic measure, in response to legal complaints about a parody web site,
> of
> shutting down the entire Thing.net network for fifteen hours on December 3-4
> virtually without warning. This affected web sites for such organizations as
> Artforum and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (and many more), seriously
> compromising Thing.net's service to its clients.
>
> The shutdown stemmed from a complaint by Dow Chemical Corporation over a web
> site created by artists' collective RTMark that parodied Dow and was hosted
> by
> Thing.net (http://rtmark.com/thingpr.html). Dow invoked the intellectual
> property and cybersquatting provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright
> Act
> (DMCA) - a law that is regularly used by corporations to prevent free speech
> -
> in demanding that the site be taken offline.
>
> NTT/Verio, in turn, claimed to be obliged both to shut down Thing.net and to
> terminate their service under the DMCA. When NTT/Verio was unable to contact
> a
> representative of Thing.net during the evening hours, they shut down the
> entire
> network - rather than just the parody Web site - and subsequently threatened
> to
> terminate their service to thing.net.
>
> "Thing.net is a commercial ISP with years of solid service," says Wolfgang
> Staehle, Thing.net Executive Director. "Verio's arbitrary and punitive
> interruption of our services has made us look unstable and inflicted serious
> damage to our reputation."
>
> "What Verio has done," asserts Ray Thomas of RTMark, the group responsible
> for
> the Dow parody site, "is like a phone company cutting off a whole
> neighborhood
> for one prank phone call."
>
> To receive donations for the expenses associated with the switchover and for
> building a more secure network, Thing.net has set up a donation page at
> http://secure.thing.net/backbone/.
>
>
> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
> # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
> # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
>
> —— End of Forwarded Message
>
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