The coatesville mansiona kind of medieval fortress full of luxuries Built at the beginning of this same century with all the opulence of the best of the resorts northwest of Auckland, in New Zealand, on January 20, 2012 became the closest thing to a ‘SWAT’ scenario. Only with real police and assault rifles. 76 officers of the special forces and two helicopters glided at dawn into a mansion that until then had become famous, beyond its sumptuousnessby the holidays in the swimming pool that his tenant organized from time to time.
It was precisely him who were they looking for. Him and three of his partners.
The objective: arrest and extradite them on charges of extortion, money laundering and copyright infringement. That same month, a United States court had presented accusations for the activity that the three businessmen had been carrying out through the Internet, which in turn launched the legal machinery to achieve an extradition that, almost eleven years later, remains tangled. in an intricate judicial chronicle marked by appeals.
From the business chronicle to the judicial one
If you were browsing the Internet in the first decade of the 2000s, the name of the Coastesville tenant may be as familiar to you as his face: Kim Dotcomthe founder of Megaupload, the portal that marked a before and after in downloads on the Internet… and, much to his regret, copyright.
Tall, stocky, dressed day and night in a cap, jacket, T-shirt and pants in rigorous black, his histrionic image starred in articles in both the specialized and general press back in the early years of the last decade. He could be seen basking in opulence on board jets, posing with his luxury car collection and on paradisiacal beaches or bathing in crowds—literally—at the parties he organized in coatesville pool.
There was a time when I jumped from economic and technological chronicles to those of socialite. For years, however, the ones where he has been seen the most are those of the judicial genrewith some cameo in politics and especially in X, where he acts as an active user who proclaims himself an “internet freedom fighter” and boasts of adding 1.7 million followers.
Who is Kim Dotcom? And what do you do today, a decade after the fall of Megaupload?
Its origins are in Kiel, Germany, far from the Antipodes where it ended up putting down roots and amassing its fortune. There, on the shores of the Baltic Sea, he was born in 1974 with the name Kim Schmitz. His mother was Finnish. His father, German. It didn’t take long for him to find in technology a fertile soil in which to carve out his future. At the age of 24, in 1998, he had already established a certain reputation among hackers of his generation and was already facing his first run-in with the law for an accusation of selling stolen phone cards. He would eventually move to Hong Kong and New Zealand.
Its other great facet, of which keep bragging on Twitteris “entrepreneur”. Although on that side he was also marked by controversy from a young age.
After failing with Data Project, a security company he had founded in 1994, Dotcom starred in a controversy in Germany by announcing his plans to invest a considerable sum of money in LetsBuylt, a firm in which he owned shares and which was then bankrupt. The businessman’s promises went down well with LebtsBuylt, which suddenly received investments again.
The problem is that Kim’s promised injection of funds failed to materialize. On the contrary, he took advantage of the new scenario and the company’s revaluation to sell his own shares for a good chunk. That —remember the BBC— it cost him an arrest in Bangkok on charges of using inside information for profit.
The business venture that would give him millions and, above all, fame, however, would be Megaupload, launched in 2005, three years after RapidShare showed the potential of direct downloading of files between users.
Their business model was seemingly harmless, similar to WeTransfer. It offered subscription services to upload and download content. Seven years ago you could opt for the free version—upload up to 250 MB and wait 30 to 60 seconds for the download—or pay between $2.99 and $200 for one of their “premium” account formats. The idea was that you could share invoices, photographs, travel videos… without overloading your email or fiddling with USB drives.
Until then everything is perfect. Nothing reprehensible, a priori. The problem is that, in practice, the purpose that many users gave to Megaupload was something different: They used it to share movies and series, a practice that became popular without the owners of Megaupload seeming to care much.
The service came to specialize by storage types: Megavideo, Megapix, Megabox… With a clear objective: to reign in file transfer.
Did you get it? It didn’t go badly.
At the beginning of 2012 Megaupload claimed to go from 60 million users registered and was presented as the 13th most visited site on the entire Internet, with an average of 50 million daily visits. In full swing —remembers UNODC itselflinked to the UN—was said to have come to represent around four percent of Internet traffic recorded on a global scale.
But there is no empire that lasts a thousand years. Especially if it goes against the interests from some of the most powerful executives in Hollywood, who accused him of causing million-dollar losses to their industry.
The American justice system made a move and in January 2012 accused Kim —already converted into Dotcom— and some of his colleagues for a criminal offense of copyrightamong other crimes. According to Swissinfothe US maintains that Megaupload illicitly obtained approximately US$175 million in revenue from hosting illegal material.
The rest is history told: a display worthy of Harrelson’s men one early morning in 2012 in the most luxurious mansion in Coatesville, with helicopters and rifles included.
Between courts, projects and headlines
Dotcom managed to regain his freedom and part of your resourcesbut his name was marked, Megaupload lowered the blind and he faced a long, very long, judicial process to try to stop his extradition to the United States.
In 2021 the Supreme Court of New Zealand rejected his appeal and months later received another setback when two of his former associates decided to leave him alone and plead guilty. He doesn’t seem ready to give up.
When this same summer The New Zealand Minister of Justice signed an order for Dotcom’s extradition to the US, the businessman did not take long to go online to register his anger. And he also did it in the challenging tone that characterizes him. “The obedient American colony in the South Pacific just decided to extradite me because of what users uploaded to Megaupload,” tweeted.
His attention over the last few years has not been focused only on the tribunes. Perhaps not with the reach and visibility that Megaupload gave it in its day, but Dotcom has continued to display his status as an “entrepreneur”the same one with which it is presented even today in X. Since 2012 he has frequently appeared in the media for his projects… and the occasional controversy.
After the closure of his former company —owned 68% of Megaupload shares— Mega started. The project launched in 2013 with a similar approach to its disgraced predecessor: secure, anonymous file sharing.
Kim took the lead of the ship, albeit briefly. He left office shortly after and in 2016 it reached star in a clash with those responsible for the company: he insinuated through his networks an imminent closure of the website, something that the person in charge of Mega was quick to call “absolutely false.”
Since then Kim hasn’t stopped. Moved to relaunch Megaupload, has embarked in new projects which even led him to record a music album (‘Good Times’) and has been associated to the crypto world. It has also tried his luck in politicsdriving without much luck a party to defend rights on the Internet.
Perhaps what has given him the most visibility, however, is the crusade on which he seems to have embarked to recover his fortune and prestigeeven though the US has already thrown a cauldron of cold water about any intention he might have to repay the money he amassed in his day with Megaupload.
Click on the image to go to the tweet.
Along the same lines, six years ago made headlines by suing the New Zealand Government for “having destroyed his reputation and business.” Dotcom demanded no more and no less than compensation of up to $6.8 billion, an amount with which, he argued, he intended to repair the damages he had suffered.
Far, far away are the days when he watched from his Coatesville mansion as Megaupload triumphed on the Internet and he became one of the most popular faces in the sector. Today your situation is very different. And not only because of the judicial setback in August, when New Zealand gave the green light to his extradition to the United States. At the end of November, Dotcom’s account on informed that the businessman is recovering of a “serious stroke”.
Image | Roberto O’Neill (Wikimedia) and Thierry Ehrmann (Flickr)
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*An earlier version of this article was published in December 2022
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