XS4ALL

XS4ALL (internet slang for "access for all") is the third-oldest ISP in the Netherlands, after NLnet and SURFnet. However, XS4ALL was the first company to offer internet to individuals. Based in Amsterdam, it offers dial-up access as well as ADSL. XS4ALL is currently (2007) one of the larger ISPs in The Netherlands. In 2005, the company had a turnover of 86.1 million euro, realising a 15.4 million euro profit before taxes. Also in 2005, XS4ALL employed 327 people (325 FTE) and served 265.000 private subscribers. The company is known for its willingness to take on controversial issues; has taken spammers to court, and fought other courtroom battles, such as Scientology vs. the Internet.

Activism and controversies

Scientology

In 1995 members of the Church of Scientology caused a raid on the servers of Dutch Internet provider XS4ALL as part of a bigger conflict with its online critics and sued it and Karin Spaink for copyright violations because of citing out of some confidential materials of Scientology. There followed a summary judgment in 1995, full proceedings in 1999, an appeal in 2001 which has been upheld by the Supreme Court of Netherlands in December 2005, all in favor of the provider and Karin Spaink, putting freedom of speech above copyright in some cases.

Station B92

In December 1996, XS4ALL put the Belgrade radio station B92 online using streaming audio technology in response to the jamming of its broadcasts by the regime of Slobodan Milošević. 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.

Radikal Magazine

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" (prosecutor's office) 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 were ignored by the German ICTF.

On April 11, 1997, one of the biggest German ISPs, the DFN academic backbone network, 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. 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.

Corporate culture

In December 1998, XS4ALL was sold to the Dutch incumbent phone company KPN, but it has nonetheless kept its unique character and identity. Many of the original employees, especially system managers, still work there.

XS4ALL also sponsors and hosts the sites of many Free Software projects, like Python, Squirrelmail and Debian. The data traffic of ScriptumLibre is sponsored too so indirectly XS4ALL helps projects like FFII and the Free Software Translation Project.

External links

* [http://www.xs4all.nl/en/ XS4ALL homepage]
* [http://www.xs4all.nl/uk/overxs4all/geschiedenis/ The history of XS4ALL]