Dotcom picks up New Zealand domain for storage site relaunch
After the government of Gabon objected to Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom's attempt to secure the domain me.ga for his new cloud storage service, Dotcom has picked up mega.co.nz.
The teaser page for Mega.
(Screenshot by Josh Taylor/ZDNet)
Earlier this month, Dotcom outed his plans for a new cloud storage site that would be "bigger, better, faster, stronger, [and] safer" than the original, and will be launched on the one-year anniversary of his arrest and the shutdown of Megaupload by US authorities.
According to the site, documents will be safe on the service, because data will be encrypted and decrypted in the users' browser, rather than through the site.
Shortly after the announcement, the government of Gabon objected to the use of the me.ga domain. Dotcom today announced that New Zealand will be the home of Mega, with mega.co.nz registered through Melbourne-based domain registrar Instra.
"New Zealand will be the home of our new website: Mega.co.nz," Dotcom tweeted. "Powered by legality and protected by the law."
Dotcom also said that he would be ordering servers in Germany where "they don't do the puppet dance for the White House."
He told TorrentFreak that he is confident that the site would not be successfully challenged by the government in New Zealand.
"The judiciary in New Zealand works. Judges are independent and not influenced by politics. That has been our experience so far," Dotcom reportedly said.
It comes as Dotcom continues to fight extradition back to the United States to face charges of copyright infringement, among others. He has argued that his former website Megaupload was protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but US prosecutors allege that the website encouraged users to infringe on copyrighted music, software, and movies, costing copyright owners an estimated US$500 million in revenue.
In June, the raid on Dotcom's residence was ruled illegal by the High Court, which called into question the admissibility of the evidence obtained during that raid. In July, the hearing into whether Dotcom should be extradited to the US was delayed until March 2013.
The New Zealand government apologised to Dotcom in September, after it was revealed that the Government Communications Security Bureau illegally spied on the Megaupload founder prior to his arrest.