Bahnhof ( German for "railway station") is a Swedish Internet service provider (ISP) founded in 1994 by Oscar Swartz in Uppsala,

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 and Umeå. WikiLeaks 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 Oscar Swartz. 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 copyrighted 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 addresses of customers, in order to defeat the Swedish government's new laws on illegal file-sharing, transposing the EU IPRED regulations, which enabled ISPs to retain data longer than the data protection regulations would allow, in order for them to be available on police request. After the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks 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 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 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 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