What Was Seized
Infostore was not just a website but one of the most prominent resources of the Ukrainian internet. According to Vzglyad, the scale of the service was as follows: about one hundred terabytes of data, mostly audio and video, one and a half million pages, and, according to the Internet Association of Ukraine (InAU), thirty percent of the daily traffic of Ukrainian users. The service's path had been long. In December 2004, it operated as a citizen-journalism site during the Orange Revolution, and by April 2006 it had become a file-sharing service accessible via UA-IX.
According to the publication, the seizure order was issued by an investigator of the Shevchenkivskyi District Department of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Kyiv. Money, system units, laptops, and storage media were taken from the offices. InAU board member Oleksandr Olshanskyi, himself one of the service's investors, said that the storage was seized at the Volia-Cable data center on Kikvidze Street, while the search of the office took place on Tverska Street. According to him, the police mistakenly burst into neighboring offices as well.
Oleksii Mas, one of the creators of Infostore, responded to the investigation's main argument about users. "We only refused to provide information—bypassing Ukrainian law—about visitors," he explained. Mas described the service's position in the conflict with the authorities in precisely these terms: according to him, it was not a refusal to comply with the law but a refusal to hand over visitor data without legal procedure.
Vitalii Kustov of assessed the situation more harshly:
"If we don't stand up for ourselves today, they will crush us, they will crush freedom of speech."
Background: A Decree, a Commission, and Rumors
Vzglyad linked the seizure to what had been happening in the Ukrainian network in the spring and summer of 2008. In April, President Yushchenko signed a decree on blocking and removing prohibited information on the internet. In parallel, the National Commission on Public Morality was at work, and rumors circulated among users about the possible closure of LiveJournal. For many internet projects, this looked like the start of a broader campaign rather than a separate criminal case.
The scale of the audience explained why the issue concerned more than a narrow group. As SputnikMedia reported, in May 2008 the audience of the Ukrainian segment of the internet, the Uanet, stood at 8 million 471 thousand people. A service carrying a third of the daily traffic of such a country could not be considered niche, and that is precisely why the industry's reaction was swift: the Internet Association of Ukraine and market participants spoke out publicly in defense of Infostore.
Who Was Behind the Service
Oleksii Mas was known long before Infostore. In January 1999, together with Ruslan Dmytrakovych, he launched the Ukrainian Banner Network (UBN): a project built on Perl, developed over three weeks at a cost of about one hundred dollars. On 7 March 2000, Mas became director of the Ukrainian Portal (UAPortal), created by a group of co-founders that included Oleksandr Soroka, Oleksandr Koreshkov, and Oleksandr Barabash of IP-Telecom.
New projects were not without difficulties either. On 22 August 2008, Mail.ua, an email service architected by Mas, appeared in closed beta, with investment in the project amounting, according to the publication, to more than one million dollars. The project was run by the Internet Invest group. Against this backdrop, the seizure of Infostore's servers looked like a blow to one of the largest platforms of the Ukrainian internet at a time when the industry was only beginning to scale new products.
The search, according to data gathered by 8 December, lasted about 12 hours. During that time, 18 servers, two storage systems, and a switch were removed from the data center and offices.
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