XS4ALL

» see xs4all.nl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

My provider was TTNET, which was the phone company with a website attached to it. The relationship was billing. It held no position on anything and I never expected it to hold one, because the notion that your internet provider might go into a courtroom on your behalf was not inside the range of things I knew to want.

XS4ALL was the other thing. It started in 1993 as an offshoot of Hack-Tic, a Dutch hacker magazine, and the name reads as access for all. It was the first company to sell internet access to the general Dutch public, and it sold that access the way its founders thought it ought to be sold: a real address on the network and a shell account, with nothing filtered on the way through the wire.

By 2005 it had 265,000 subscribers and 327 employees, which in a country the size of the Netherlands is a serious business rather than a hobby that got out of hand. It was never the cheapest option. People paid the difference on purpose.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the fight ~

In 1995 the Church of Scientology went after a Dutch writer named Karin Spaink, who had published documents from a Scientology court case on her home page. That page was hosted at XS4ALL. Nearly every provider handed a demand like that complies within the week, takes the page down, and forwards the customer's details along with it.

XS4ALL refused. The case ground through the Dutch courts for about a decade and ended with free expression placed ahead of the copyright claim, and that ruling is the reason people outside the Netherlands know the name at all. An internet provider spent its own money for ten years defending one customer's web page against an organization with a reputation for never stopping.

~ what really happened ~

KPN, the former state telephone monopoly, bought XS4ALL in December 1998 and then did the unlikely thing of leaving it alone. For twenty years it ran as an independent subsidiary with its own staff and its own posture, more expensive than the market and worth it to the sort of customer who cared about any of the above.

In January 2019 KPN announced it was dropping both the Telfort and XS4ALL brands and moving everybody onto KPN. An action group formed and more than fifty thousand people signed to stop it, which for a Dutch internet provider is an extraordinary number of people willing to sign anything about their broadband. It did not stop. The last services under the name were sold on 24 December 2021.

~ what replaced it ~

In November 2019, with the ending already visible from a distance, former XS4ALL people started Freedom Internet and raised roughly two and a half million euro in crowdfunding to get it standing. It is smaller and it is still there, run on the same argument about what a provider owes the person paying it.

The thing customers were attached to was never the network. Any company can move packets, and KPN was moving the same packets over the same copper the whole time. What XS4ALL had was a willingness to spend its own money in a courtroom for a customer nobody else would defend, and that does not survive a brand consolidation, because it never appears anywhere on the balance sheet as a thing being lost.

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