Campaigners hail 'success' of European Net strike

NEWS Sunday's European Internet strike has been proclaimed a success - at least in terms of the publicity it generated for groups campaigning for cheaper Net access. Citizens in 15 European countries were encouraged by groups such as the UK's CUT (Campaign for Unmetered Telecoms) to boycott the Internet for a day. Daniel Bieler, analyst at Ovum, said: "It sends a message out to politicians. I'm not sure there has been that much direct impact - although the last strike claimed a 95 per cent reduction in IP (Internet protocol) traffic - but it has been some kind of success, because a lot of attention has been brought to the subject." Some people learnt about the strike from media outlets such as Silicon.com and BBC Radio 4. Adam Daum, analyst at GartnerGroup Dataquest, said: "This has been across the mainstream media, and that's good, because it's normally difficult to put pressure on major telcos, and regulators in Europe are not in touch with consumer sentiment - metered telephony is an important issue." A spokeswoman for America Online (AOL) said: "We did register some impact on our service, but weren't expecting much. We share CUT's view that this is about awareness. Our member base has shown a lot of interest in this subject, and they tell us again and again that dial-up costs are the main thing stopping them spending more time online." AOL and CUT have sided together against BT, which controls the local loop, and Internet service providers (ISPs) that rely on carving up dial-up charges. Last week, CUT admitted to Silicon.com that it would measure the success of the strike in terms of "column inches and media interest rather than an attack on telcos' revenues".