XS4ALL
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XS4ALL (pronounced "access for all") is the second-oldest ISP in the Netherlands, after NLnet. Based in Amsterdam, it offers dial-up access as well as ADSL. The company is known for its willingness to take on controversial issues; has taken spammers to court, making it the target for many Internet vandals, and fought other courtroom battles, such as Scientology vs. the Internet.
XS4ALL was established in Amsterdam in 1994 by Felipe Rodriquez, Rop Gonggrijp, Paul Jongsma and Cor Bosman. It grew out of the Hacktic Network, a UUCP network, and Utopia, a hacker BBS. Hacktic Network was started by the contributors to Hack-Tic, an underground hackers' magazine. Hacktic subsequently evolved into XS4ALL, the first public Unix system in the Netherlands. XS4ALL quickly grew into a large full-service ISP. The provider service separated from the hacker organization and soon after became independent.
On January 15, 1994, De Digitale Stad ("The Digital City") opened, the result of a joint venture by De Balie, the Amsterdam cultural center, and XS4ALL. DDS was a Free-Net, a free system open to the public. The aim of DDS was to bring politics and citizens together in an online community.
XS4ALL initiated the Dutch Internet Industry Association (NLIP) in 1995. Together with a large number of other Internet providers, the association was created with Felipe Rodriquez, then the director of XS4ALL, as its chairman until 1997. As one of the leading organizations within NLIP, XS4ALL has always had a strong voice against censorship regulation and against the erosion of privacy.
In December 1996, XS4ALL put the Belgrade radio station B92 online using steaming audio technology in response to the jamming of its broadcasts by the regime of Slobodan Milosevic. XS4ALL installed a leased line to the radio station in response to a request from Adrienne van Heteren, a Dutch citizen who went to Belgrade to set up various cultural activities. After XS4ALL had launched the online broadcast of Radio B92, its signal was picked up by the Voice of America and transmitted back into Serbia.
In September 1996, members of the German Internet Content Task Force (ICTF) blocked XS4ALL for about a month because one of its subscribers had put an issue of Radikal Magazine on his homepage. Radikal is illegal in Germany, and to prevent its publication the German Bundesanwaltschaft ordered commercial ISPs in Germany to block its website. They ended up blocking the entire XS4ALL site, which at the time had about 6,000 personal and commercial homepages. XS4ALL insisted that the case to be settled by the courts, because it did not want to infringe on its customers' rights of free expression; however, the requests to follow traditional legal paths where ignored by the German ICTF. XS4ALL then implemented several technologies to sabotage the censorship attempt, such as automatically rotating the IP address of its website. The ICTF ended up censoring all IP traffic to the XS4ALL domain, including e-mail. After a couple of weeks this became untenable; a global protest against the censorship emerged, and a global network of mirror sites was created by the online community. The ICTF abandoned its efforts after several weeks.
On April 11, 1997, one of the biggest German ISPs, the DFN, a university network in Germany, started an IP-filtering blockade against XS4ALL. Many protest letters were sent, mirrors were once again set up around the world, and the complete issue of radikal 154 was posted in the newsgroup de.soc.zensur. As a result, the blockade only lasted a few days. The founders of XS4ALL were interrogated as suspects of publication of terrorist propaganda, but no legal actions were initiated against them.
In December 1998, XS4ALL was sold to the Dutch telephone company KPN, but it has nonetheless kept its unique character and identity. It currently has about 200,000 subscribers.
External links
- XS4ALL homepage (http://www.xs4all.nl/)
- The history of XS4ALL (http://www.xs4all.nl/uk/overxs4all/geschiedenis/)