Internet activism, Czech-style

Valasek was 10 years old when the revolution broke out, and barely aware even of the existence of computers. "During previous times," he says, "we could not travel, could not go to England, to the United States, anywhere in the West. The Internet gives us the chance now to learn from these places." In two days, Valasek and a group of other activists -- a musician, an economist and another programmer -- collected 3,500 signatures on a petition demanding lower rates.

Nationwide, Internet Against Monopoly collected 104,802 signatures demanding a rate reduction. Most of the signatures, representing more than 1 percent of the Czech Republic's population of 10 million, were gathered via the Internet. The group's Web site -- which includes an English-language translation of its demands -- became the most popular destination in the short history of the Czech Web, logging more than 100,000 hits in the first day of the boycott.

Until 1989 in then-Czechoslovakia, computers were limited to universities -- even there, access was sharply limited -- and the Net barely existed. In the nine years since the revolution, the use of computers and the Internet has skyrocketed. Today, some 300,000 to 400,000 people have regular access to the Net, according to research by the brokerage house Patria Finance. Another 100,000 have home computers but are not yet wired. Every major Czech business has a Web site, and e-mail usage is widespread. Prague boasts several cyber-cafes -- hubs for avant-gardists, techies and travelers -- and at least half a dozen glossy Internet magazines, in addition to Webzines that take on everything from the country's media scene to anarchist politics to porn.

The proposed rate hike strikes directly at this increasingly lively Internet scene, according to Ondre Neff, a bestselling science-fiction writer and editor of the nation's biggest Webzine, a daily called Invisible Dog -- which combines spicy political, cultural and media reporting with news about the Internet.

"It's gangsterism," says Neff, 57, the grand old man of the movement, easily twice the age of the rest of the country's computer pioneers. Neff's latest book, "Blackout," conjures a world in which the country is plunged back into the Middle Ages after a permanent collapse of the electrical system. The petition he helped write evokes, with some considerable poetic license, the apocalyptic implications of cutting people off from the Internet. "We warn against this trend," the petition reads, "as it would result in being behind the times, in stagnation in the industrial revolution age instead of proceeding to the information revolution age ... We consider it an aggression against one of the world's most progressive forms of communication."

Existing rates are already among the highest in Europe. Access calls cost 2.4 crowns (about eight cents) every three minutes; the proposed increase would have jumped that to 2.6 crowns for two minutes. (European users rarely are offered the flat-rate pricing that so benefits U.S. Net users.) Assuming one hour online per day, the average Czech Internet user already faces a monthly bill of around 2,000 crowns ($65) a month -- a significant expense in a country with a per capita income of just $450 a month. Two days before announcing the price rise, Telecom announced a 19-percent rise in its revenues for the year.

Lukacovic says that the Internet has become a critical part of the country's democratic development, offering voices and perspectives independent of the mass media, which is frequently tied to corporate and government interests -- a sign, if nothing else, that the post-Communist Czech Republic is becoming much like other Western countries. Immediately following Telecom's announcement of rate increases in late October, for example, the company launched its largest ad campaign to date, involving TV commercials and two-page spreads in many of the country's leading newspapers and magazines. Lovacovic claims that coverage of the boycott by many recipients of the company's largesse was either nonexistent or highly negative.

The best reporting on the financial affairs of Telecom was, unsurprisingly, on the Net itself. Invisible Dog published confidential documents outlining the company's secret agreement with the government. That agreement outlines an understanding in which the government, which owns 51 percent of Telecom, agreed not to exercise its majority rights, and in fact ceded a majority of board seats to its private partner -- a Dutch-Swiss telecommunications giant called TelSource, which owns 27 percent of the company (the remainder is owned by holding companies and Czech citizens issued privatization vouchers). In return for a monopoly, TelSource agreed to invest millions of dollars in improving the Czech infrastructure for telecommunications -- which the Internet Against Monopoly protesters say it has not done.

Internet Against Monopoly is asking for a different rate structure for voice and data transmissions, proposing a flat 500-crown (about $16) monthly fee for unlimited use of the Internet (an amount that currently buys about four hours). But the campaign quickly expanded beyond the phone rates to a demand for an early end to TelSource's monopoly and increased competition as a means of lowering phone rates; many are now demanding an auditing of the company's books. "The train has left the station and we don't want to stop now," says Valasek.

The scope of support for the boycott took everyone by surprise and forced the company to react. "Our simple comment," says Telecom spokeswoman Dvorakova, "is that the boycott showed how important a service the Internet is for the future. We take this as a message from our customers."

Last week, Telecom released a new rate schedule, dubbed Internet 99, that slightly lowers nighttime rates but adds a new wrinkle: a set-up fee for each dial-up, whether or not a connection is interrupted. Such broken connections are frequent here -- in some offices it only takes the rumble of a nearby street tram to cut Internet connections.

Internet Against Monopoly is planning further protests if the company does not withdraw the set-up fee. Others, like Valasek and more radical members of the group based in Brno, want everyone's phone rates lowered, not just those of Internet users. The Social Democratic government -- which has accused TelSource of illicit campaign contributions to its Civic Democratic Party predecessors, who awarded TelSource the contract in 1995 -- has promised to raise the issue of the company's monopoly obligations at a board meeting on Dec. 16.

It has taken only nine years, but kids like Michal Valasek understand precisely the reason for the company's quick, at least partial, capitulation: "They spent millions of crowns on an ad campaign for their image, and we've just hurt their image. That's the reason they're talking to us," he says.

The world of the 1989 Velvet Revolution was defined by the constraints of a closed system that infused every aspect of life. For that revolution's kids, whose view of the world is shaped by a profusion of communications technology unimaginable back during the low-tech Communist era, the commissars of the phone company seem a natural target -- a monopoly power in what was supposed to be a free and honest market.

When 24-year-old Lukacovic stood on the Telecom steps denouncing the company's rates, he recalled a voice echoing in his ear -- that of Vaclav Maly, a priest and behind-the-scenes leader of the marches on Wenceslas Square in 1989. Lukacovic was 14 then, a young kid swept along by the historic forces of the moment.

"During the revolution, I was down in the crowd," he recalls. "Last week, I was up in front of it. I remembered how Maly spoke, clearly and slowly. It was necessary to prevent people from getting too emotional, because it's easy to get people angry and hard to settle them down."

In 1989, no one wanted an act of violent outrage to provide the slightest excuse for a brutal counterattack by the police. And though the stakes today are so obviously different, Lukacovic similarly didn't want anyone to disrupt the scene of diligent Internet users attacking the object of their antagonism with humor and public pressure. Not a stone was thrown that day; the police looked on quietly. And this high-tech generation's own single-party system is beginning to respond.

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