The 15 national campaign groups that took part in Sunday’s pan-European internet boycott reported varying degrees of success, some boasting net traffic reduced by over a third, some admitting less success. In the UK, British Telecommunications Plc said it noted no decrease in internet or voice traffic over the 24-hour strike, whereas Spain’s Asociacion de Internautas (Surfers’ Association) claimed the boycott had reduced web traffic by almost 36%.
Across the nations taking part, a variety of demands were made. Most campaigns call for the scrapping of metered billing for calls to the internet, some for reduced ISP subscription fees and lower call charges. The Spanish campaign, which wants unmetered billing, took figures using web monitoring software which it said indicated hits to a sample 10,000 web sites dropped by 35.8% when compared to the five Sundays in May. It also claimed use of internet relay chat dropped by 60% and use of email fell by an astounding, if improbable, 90%. Spanish incumbent telco Telefonica SA reported that usage of its ISP business dropped a mere 4% compared to an average Sunday during the boycott.
Despite the lack of corroborative metrics, in the UK the Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunication (CUT) hailed the strike a success. The organization received coverage in dozens of publications and across the national broadcast media, as well as securing the sponsorship of America Online Inc’s UK subsidiary, which wants metered telecommunications scrapped for its own corporate reasons, having suffered since the rise of the ‘free’ ISP. The group pointed triumphantly to this week’s UK parliamentary schedule, which features a short debate on telecommunications regulation and the growth of the internet.
However, whatever the outcome of this debate, BT plans to stick to its pricing policy guns. A migration to the US flat-fee model demanded by CUT would mean higher line rental and higher long-distance calls for those who do not use the internet, BT said. Coincidentally, the UK telco did introduce toll-free weekend internet access last week.
Elsewhere on the continent, the Association Suisse des Internautes (the Swiss internet users association) says it has now opened a dialogue with incumbent telco Swisscom AG, but was discouraged by the lack of local media coverage leading up to the event. Swedish campaign bojkott.cjb.net claimed its incumbent, Telia AB, sabotaged the boycott by launching a cut-rate access package the weekend it took place.
