Whatever else he may be, Kim Dotcom is a character. The founder of Megaupload, he has been in trouble with the law for many years and when he wasn’t being accused of insider trading he was busy throwing lavish parties on yachts and making himself the object of opprobrium by owning a fleet of luxury cars with vanity number plates. Kim, dude, nobody likes a gloater. On the other hand, until he was arrested he was the number one ranked player for Modern Warfare 3. Number one out of more than 15m! Now that is impressive.
Anyway, Dotcom has always been an activist for internet freedoms and Megaupload landed him in hot water for being an easy to hit target for pirated content. Rather than back away from a large scale hosting company in favor of the far more slippery peer-to-peer protocols like torrents and magnet links, Kim Dotcom launched Mega, an alternative to Megaupload that used encryption to make sure that no government agencies or media snoopers could determine what content was up there.
The new venture did not find the fame that Megaupload had (at the height of its popularity, it was the 13th most visited site on the internet). The key, Kim believes, is in the name, so on Sunday he announced via Twitter that he was relaunching Megaupload. When he was asked why not just stick with Mega, his response was to-the-point and typically self-aggrandizing: “Mega NZ is dead! Download limits. Chinese ownership. Funding issues. No Kim Dotcom. Megaupload 2.0 will change the game.”
Certainly the funding issues should not be a concern to Kimble (to give him his internet name). Reuters reports that in 2010 the FBI estimated he made about $115k a day. Even though it would be unkind to suggest that he spent it all on cheeseburgers, it’s a safe bet that there’s a substantial pot of cash out there for him to fulfil his ambition.
Perhaps the bigger question is whether or not there is a role for a company like this in an age of more distributed data and indeed whether or not Kim Dotcom at the helm is more a hindrance than a help.
