Friday, Jul 25, 2008
Internet activism, Czech-style: By Mark Schapiro. The Communists are yesterday's target -- today, it's the phone company's Net-access rate hikes.
Dec 8, 1998 | PRAGUE, Czech Republic -- As their parents hit the streets a decade ago to protest Communist rule, the children of Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution were hitting puberty. Now, this generation, bred on the border-crashing irreverence of the Internet, is finding a new target, a successor to the monolithic force the Communist Party once represented for their parents: the phone company.
Over the past three weeks, a campaign of computer users and Internet providers has sent thousands of young Czechs into the streets to protest an effort by SPT Telecom -- which holds a government-sanctioned phone monopoly in the Czech Republic until 2000 -- to raise its rates for local dial-ups by as much as 62 percent.
"That would just kill Internet users and providers in this country," says Ivo Lukacovic, 24, founder of the country's largest search engine, a sort of Czech Yahoo, and one of the principle organizers of the campaign.
The protests kicked off on Nov. 18, when more than 1,000 of the country's leading Web sites went dark for 24 hours, with nothing but a bright yellow and blue banner across their opening page stating the group's name and slogan, Internet Against Monopoly (in Czech, Internet proti monopolu). The organizers claim, according to unofficial figures supplied by local switching stations, that there was also a 20-30 percent drop in local telephone usage on that day. Telecom spokeswoman Dana Dvorakova says the drop-off in phone use was "about 4 percent."
On the same day, protesters organized rallies in Prague and Brno. In Prague, 2,500 people gathered across the street from Telecom's Soviet-style headquarters and delivered to a company vice president a three-foot-long, papier mbchi yellow spider -- their symbol for the monopoly -- devouring a computer keyboard. To drive the point home, the demonstrators tied themselves by the neck with rope, creating an enormous walking spider web.
In Brno that day, 2,000 people chanted slogans adapted to the post-revolutionary dialectic: "Down with TeleCommunism!" and "From Stalin to TeleCommunism!" The Brno group displayed a particularly pungent sense of humor: Demonstrators brought colored scarves to the rally and used them to transmit, semaphore style, the company's slogan: "Communication is the basis of understanding."
"We wanted to show that we were capable of sending them back their own message without using the telephone," gleefully commented one of the Brno organizers, 19-year-old Michal Valasek. In his second year of a program in information studies at Masaryk University, Valasek wears a black T-shirt and has thick black hair past his shoulders, with nubs of acne across his face. He owns a local Internet server and works as a programmer and Web designer. Other than his halting English (he was translated by his 18-year-old girlfriend, whose T-shirt sported the campaign's bright yellow logo reading, "Price Increase! Boycott!"), he would be right at home in a UC-Berkeley computer lab.
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