The British company Biwater plc has recently threatened two non-profit Internet Service Providers, GreenNet in the UK and SangoNet in South Africa, with legal action to make them censor users' material. The materials referred to old newspaper articles about the company's involvement in links between British Government aid and UK arms sales.
In both cases, the ISPs were hosting material which contained information which was already publicly accessible from a vast number of sources outside the Internet. The material the company wanted to censor was old, but Biwater's action has brought it back to life and rekindled great interest for a world-wide audience.
The information threatened was part of a LabourNet campaign against the privatisation of water resources in South Africa. Biwater has not only threatened to sue the above mentioned Internet Providers, but also the South African newspaper Mail and Guardian.
Because of the company's attempt to censor this information, some members of the APC network have decided to make the pages available to the Internet community. The pages are available from LabourNet special Biwater sites in Denmark and The Netherlands.
LabourNet promotes computer communications as a medium for strengthening and building organised labour. They are in the forefront of using the resources of the internet to provide communications, news and information for the labour movement.
The Association for Progressive Communication (APC) is a global network which works to enable communication between organisations working for social chance. APC, Association for Progressive Communication, have users in over 100 countries and our mission is to create space and tools for them to communicate, debate, exchange information and in some areas in the world to have a voice at all.
APC has enabled communications between people during war, under dictatorships, and in areas of poverty where the financial means makes it hard to communicate at all. And to create a space for NGOs in the industrial and democratical countries, where normal freedom of speech is used to express various facts and opinions without problems.
We believe all people should have the right to use the Internet in order to seek out the truth. It's by sharing of information the truth can be reached.
Inform - APC in Denmark
Antenna - APC in the Netherlands