The Internet in Austria will go dark for two hours Tuesday as the country's service providers protest a police raid last week on a Vienna ISP.
The action by more than 75 ISPs stems from a raid Thursday on VIP in which seven police officers searched the company's headquarters and confiscated its hardware. VIP's 400 customers were left without Net access indefinitely, said Peter Wlcek, VIP webmaster. The coalition of protesting ISPs, the Association of Austrian Internet Providers, describe the government's actions as "illegal" and "frighteningly incompetent," and they have filed suit.
The authorities were responding to February 1996 postings by a former VIP customer to a pedophile newsgroup. Child pornography in any form is illegal in Austria.
"The point is that police have known the name and address of this man ... but they raided us nevertheless," Wlcek told Quintessenz, an Austrian Web magazine. The postings were on the server for only a few days, as is common for most Usenet hosts.
But why did the police - under a request for assistance issued by the public prosecutor's office in Munich one year ago - wait so long to carry out the raid?
"The most important fact is that the whole thing is pure politics," Erich Moechel, Internet reporter for WirtschaftsBlatt, an Austrian business daily, told Wired News. The magistrate leading the ISP crackdown, Helene Partik-Pable, is also a member of the ultraconservative Freedom Party. The Austrian parliament is now debating how to update the country's antiquated telecom laws to include the Internet, and some say that her actions are intended to highlight the existence of online pornography and other potentially illegal content.
Although Austria's laws regarding Net content and access remain unresolved, ISPs are held accountable for all content hosted on their servers and face strict penalties for violating Austrian laws banning hate speech and child pornography.
The Austrian ISP association said at a news conference in Vienna on Monday that it plans to create an Internet coordination office to keep track of alerts of illegal content, and that it intends to work with the authorities.
"Content control of such a vast quantity of information is for Internet service providers neither reasonable nor possible," the coalition said.
