Bahnhof (

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ger ...

for "railway station") is a Swedish

Internet service provider An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise private ...

(ISP) founded in 1994 by

Oscar Swartz Per Oscar Swartz (December 1, 1959) is a Swedish entrepreneur, writer and blogger. Oscar Swartz was born in Solna, Stockholm County. He is the great-grandson of the former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Swartz, and a second cousin of the publishe ...

Uppsala Uppsala (, or all ending in , ; archaically spelled ''Upsala'') is the county seat of Uppsala County and the List of urban areas in Sweden by population, fourth-largest city in Sweden, after Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö. It had 177,074 inha ...

Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden,The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names states that the country's formal name is the Kingdom of SwedenUNGEGN World Geographical Names, Sweden./ref> is a Nordic country located on ...

, and is the country's first independent ISP. Today the company is represented in

Stockholm Stockholm () is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in Sweden by population, largest city of Sweden as well as the List of urban areas in the Nordic countries, largest urban area in Scandinavia. Approximately 980,000 people liv ...

Gothenburg Gothenburg (; abbreviated Gbg; sv, Göteborg ) is the second-largest city in Sweden, fifth-largest in the Nordic countries, and capital of the Västra Götaland County. It is situated by the Kattegat, on the west coast of Sweden, and has ...

, Uppsala,

Borlänge Borlänge is a locality in Dalarna County, Sweden with 44,898 inhabitants as of 2020. It is the seat of the Borlänge Municipality with a total population of 51,604 inhabitants as of 2017. History Originally Borlänge was the name of a tin ...

Malmö Malmö (, ; da, Malmø ) is the largest city in the Swedish county (län) of Scania (Skåne). It is the third-largest city in Sweden, after Stockholm and Gothenburg, and the sixth-largest city in the Nordic region, with a municipal populat ...

and

Umeå Umeå ( , , , locally ; South Westrobothnian: ;). fi, Uumaja; sju, Ubmeje; sma, Upmeje; se, Ubmi) is a city in northeast Sweden. It is the seat of Umeå Municipality and the capital of Västerbotten County. Situated on the Ume River, Ume� ...

WikiLeaks WikiLeaks () is an international Nonprofit organization, non-profit organisation that published news leaks and classified media provided by anonymous Source (journalism), sources. Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activism, Internet acti ...

used to be hosted in a Bahnhof

data center A data center (American English) or data centre (British English)See spelling differences. is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunic ...

inside the ultra-secure bunker Pionen, which is buried inside the White Mountains in

History

Bahnhof was founded in 1994 by

. It was one of Sweden's first ISPs. The company is publicly traded since December 2007 under the name BAHN-B (Aktietorget). On 11 September 2008, Bahnhof opened a new computer center inside the former civil defence center Pionen in the White Mountains in Stockholm, Sweden.

Controversies

On 10 March 2005, the Swedish police confiscated four servers placed in the Bahnhof premises, hoping to find

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, education ...

ed material. Although these servers were located near Bahnhof's server park (in a network lab area) the company claimed they were not their property since they had been privately purchased by staff. They further presented evidence showing the material on these servers had been planted there by someone hired by

Svenska Antipiratbyrån Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...

, a Swedish anti-copyright infringement organisation. In 2009, Bahnhof generated controversy by failing to store the

IP address An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as that is connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.. Updated by . An IP address serves two main functions: network interface ident ...

es of customers, in order to defeat the Swedish government's new laws on illegal file-sharing, transposing the EU

IPRED Directive 2004/48/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 29 April 2004 on the enforcement of intellectual property rights (also known as "(IPR) Enforcement Directive" or "IPRED") is a European Union directive in the field of intelle ...

regulations, which enabled ISPs to retain data longer than the

data protection Information privacy is the relationship between the collection and dissemination of data, technology, the public expectation of privacy, contextual information norms, and the legal and political issues surrounding them. It is also known as data pr ...

regulations would allow, in order for them to be available on police request. After the

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website

was kicked off of Amazon Web Services in December 2010, it bought server space from Bahnhof, as its chairman Jon Karlung revealed in press interviews after in the light of the new controversy created by the leaks about the War in Afghanistan, even showing journalists the two servers on which the data was held. The chairman said that WikiLeaks is treated like any other of Bahnhof's clients. In April 2014, the CJEU struck down the

Data Retention Directive The Data Retention Directive (Directive 2006/24/EC), a directive, later declared invalid by the European Court of Justice, was at first passed on 15 March 2006 and regulated data retention, where data has been generated or processed in connect ...

. PTS, Sweden's telecommunications regulator, told Swedish

ISPs An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise private ...

and telcos that they would no longer have to retain call records and internet metadata. However, after two government investigations found that Sweden's data retention law did not break its obligations to the

European Convention on Human Rights The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR; formally the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms) is an international convention to protect human rights and political freedoms in Europe. Drafted in 1950 by t ...

, the PTS reversed course. Most of Sweden's major telecommunications companies complied immediately, though Tele2 lodged an unsuccessful appeal. Bahnhof was the one holdout and it was given an order to comply by a 24 November deadline or face a five million kronor ($680,000) fine. In response Bahnhof offered all their customers a free VPN service. In October 2018,

Elsevier Elsevier () is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as ''The Lancet'', ''Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, '' Trends'', th ...

secured a court order that required Swedish ISPs to block access to Sci-Hub websites. While complying with the order, Bahnhof also soft-blocked access to Elsevier website.

References

External links

* * * {{in lang, sv
Pictures of ''Pionen''
on ''Architecture News Plus'' Swedish companies established in 1994 Intellectual property activism Internet service providers of Sweden The Pirate Bay WikiLeaks Companies based in Stockholm