EX.UA

» see ex.ua as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

EX.UA never reached me, and there is no reason it would have. it was a Ukrainian file host that ran in Russian and Ukrainian, for a part of the internet Turkey does not share a wall with. by the years it mattered i was already sorted for files elsewhere. so i learned this one the way you learn about a neighbor's flood, after it happened and from the outside.

here is the shape of it. EX.UA started in 2009 and became the biggest cyberlocker in Ukraine, the default place a whole country parked its downloads. music and films uploaded and traded in the open. by the time the authorities moved on it, the servers held something like six petabytes of data. that is not a hobby site. that is national infrastructure that happened to be built on other people's copyrights.

which is why the raid backfired the way it did. on 31 January 2012 police walked into the offices, seized around two hundred servers and questioned the staff, after a complaint from the big software firms. anyway, the response was not a petition. within a day, Ukrainian government websites started going down, the president's site among them, hit by people angry that their file host had been taken. four days later EX.UA was back online. the state had blinked first.

so it got a second life, and used it. it ran for four more years as if nothing had happened. what finally ended it was not a raid but a law. in 2016 Ukraine passed rules that let copyright holders block a site without going to a court, and the pressure came back as threats and denial-of-service attacks. on 16 November 2016 the people behind EX.UA said they were closing the file-sharing side for good. the email service kept running. the thing everyone had actually come for did not.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the day it died ~

The 2016 ending was quiet in a way the 2012 one was not. no servers carried out this time, no government sites falling over in retaliation. just an announcement that the fight was not worth having under the new law, and a date. in those days a court order was the thing that gave you room to argue. the 2016 law took the court out of it, and once anyone could get you blocked on a filing, being the biggest target in the country stopped being survivable.

~ the next chapter ~

what EX.UA proved, in 2012 at least, was how much political weight a file host can carry when a whole country keeps its cultural life on it. for four days a cyberlocker was strong enough to make a government back down. that does not happen for a site nobody needs. it happens when the thing you switched off is where people keep their music and their memories, and they notice the instant it is gone.

by 2016 the ground had shifted and the same site could be closed with a form. the servers that once held six petabytes went quiet, the domain kept forwarding mail for a while, and the largest file host Ukraine ever had became another name you only find now in other people's write-ups. i was never one of its users. i can still read what it was from the size of the hole it left.

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