Hi Anriette; sorry for the late reply; we had a severe server breakdown that has taken most of my time...

There are several reasons for our decision, which could take up several pages. There are several incidents over the last few years that has convinced us that APC is not the progressive forum we thought.

We are unhappy to see that the activities and money spent within the APC is not benefitting our users or our organisation. On the contrary, we have been spending lots of ressources on the APC without getting anything back. Instead, we see a few big members benefitting from large-scale fundraising to support their own activities.

Summary: Our objectives for joining the APC was to establish contacts with like-minded people in other countries in order to cooperate technically and politically.

Technically
The technical cooperation inside APC only exist as member-to-member relations, and the few attempts we have made in order to formalize tech cooperation has been ignored. We have proposed establishing regional workshops in order to learn new techniques and share experience between members, but this was only reluctantly accepted in Mexico and afterwards totally ignored. We also proposed other mutual projects like international roaming etc. but there has been no interest in this either...of course we have happily provided free accounts for people travelling to Denmark if they had accounts with their local APC member. We have proposed giving up the national monopoly of APC membership in order to get more outreach...but no. We have proposed a new distribution scheme for the newsfeed to improve internal communications, which has also been ignored. Newsfeed and internal communication is still unreliable. We have proposed action in the Biwater case, which was also ignored. When Inform and Antenna put up the mirror sites, some members began moving, but APC was not willing to come out with one voice. (But the case was good for fundraising purposes afterwards, where the APC took the credit for members' efforts in order to raise money for itself.) We have offered time and ressources for NordNet, running their services for more than two years. APC has not tried in any way to help NordNet back on it's feet, and in case NordNet closes down, Inform is the looser with a 3000$ debt to APC (the loan to NordNet which APC insisted that Inform guaranteed before reluctantly granting it). We have offered time and ressources for GreenNet, in order to move the newsfeed off their servers at a time where they felt they were unable to handle it. We have wasted hours in making this transition because of bad communication with IGC on technical nitty-gritty. The list is longer...

Politically
We find it concerning that

• APC sacrifices members when it is economically convenient (Slovenia)
• APC needs to go into internal discussion about commercial versus Open Source applications
• APC refuses to act on the Biwater case as an organisation
• APC refuses to act on ethical questions (BTW: did we ever see the report from Cilla?)
• APC agrees to accept money from sources that are potentially CIA controlled
• APC needs to go into internal discussions on formal issues like conflicts of interest which are obvious to us
• APC projects

Economically
APC is lucky to have a professional fundraiser employed, but we find it concerning that the organisation operates with a million $ budget while the wast majority of members never benefit from this. Inform has been paying several thousend $ in membership fees, but we can not point to any outcome. In contrary, we feel that our membership and the work we are doing is mainly being used to generate even more money to activities which do not benefit neither us as an organisation or our users.

APC internals
We believe that the internal policy-making and decision-making processes are intransperant and to some extent non-democratic. We find it alarming that the work of the EB is not documented properly in the conference. These are some of the things that come to mind...all of them are well know to those who have participated in the debates over the last few years. I hope this clarifies our position. I believe that there is a need for an international cooperation between NGO-orientated ISPs and companies/organisations working with Internet concepts, but I do not see that the APC is able to fill this need.