Gazo-ch

» see gazo-ch.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

画像ちゃんねる opened in December 2002 and did the one thing its name promised. It was an image channel: numbered boards, a posting form, and a wall of thumbnails that other people had put there. The company behind it was T-net, registered in Minato in Tokyo, and by 2006 the site was one of the largest of its kind in Japan, moving something like 73 million page views in a year on a format whose entire technology was an upload button and a thread.

Japanese image boards of that era sat in a particular legal hole. The board keeps nothing itself. Its users post, and what they post ranges from the harmless to the unlawful, and for the first decade of the format nobody had settled who answers for the second category. Every operator ran on the assumption that the answer was the person who pressed submit.

In 2007 the Kanagawa police settled it the other way, and Gazo-ch was the test case. The site shut down that July while the case ran, came back in January 2008 with somebody else holding the keys, and then had a long quiet second life behind an age-verification page that nobody wrote articles about. The interesting part of its history is the eighteen months in the middle.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the arrest ~

The house search came on 21 February 2007. On 23 May the police arrested T-net's president along with six others, staff and part-timers, for publicly displaying obscene images. The charge was not that they had uploaded anything. It was that they had kept the files on their servers and made them reachable, which put the liability on the people who owned the machine.

The Japanese board scene understood the implication immediately. Within about a day, several large image boards posted their own closing notices, among them VIPろだ and 画像掲示板がむしゃら, and Internet Watch ran a piece on 25 May counting the casualties. One operator's goodbye read, roughly: it looks like somebody running an upload site has been arrested, so I am going to suspend operations until the details are clear. Gazo-ch itself came down on 25 July.

May 2007 happens to be the month Turkey passed its own law on who answers for what is hosted, and the years right after it were the years of the blocked sites. The specifics are not comparable and the instinct is the same everywhere: the uploader is hard to find and the server has an address. Japan got there through an obscenity statute and a police raid. I got there through a browser that stopped loading things.

~ the reopening ~

The court handed down its sentence on 17 January 2008: two years, suspended for three. Testimony in the case put the site's advertising income at roughly 100 million yen over three years, which is the number that turned it from a hobby board into a business in the court's eyes.

On the same date, the site came back. A new administrator, recorded only as Kim, took over the boards, and Gazo-ch spent the next seven years behind a front page that did nothing except ask whether you were an adult. No press covered the second era, because the second era was one of thousands of sites running quietly on a template that stopped being new in 2004.

~ hello ~

There is no shutdown announcement to find, so the crawler dates it. The main board index was serving a full 17 kilobyte page of live threads on 21 March 2015. By 19 May the same address returned 404, and the front page had gone with it. From 10 June 2015 onward, every capture of gazo-ch.net is the same 5 bytes of plain text, no markup, no notice: hello.

That page sat there for years, which is a stranger ending than a farewell message. Somebody kept paying for the domain and left a greeting on it. Today the name forwards to one of those recycled ad hosts with a ww17 prefix, so even the greeting is gone and the address is inventory now.

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