Pirate Bay Founder Thinks Parler’s Inability to Stay Online Is ‘Embarrassing’

As one of the original co-founders of The Pirate Bay, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi knows a little something about keeping controversial services online. Kolmisoppi and his colleagues spent decades battling a global coalition of corporations, governments, and law enforcement agencies intent on wiping the file sharing website from the face of the internet. Unsuccessfully.

Kolmisoppi took to Twitter this week to share some thoughts on Parler’s recent deplatforming for failing to seriously police death threats and illegal content before and after the fatal Capitol riots. 

“The Pirate Bay, the most censored website in the world, started by kids, run by people with problems with alcohol, drugs and money, still is up after almost two decades,” Kolmisoppi said. “Parlor and gab etc have all the money around but no skills or mindset. Embarrassing.”

Parler, part of a growing echosphere for rightwing conspiracy theories, is primarily financed by hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah. But the company’s deep pockets haven’t been able to assuage the concerns of companies unwilling to do business with a toxic enabler of hate speech in the wake of last week’s violent riot.

While Parler has found a new provider in the far-right enablers over at Epik, the service isn’t expected to get back online anytime soon, in large part because, according to CEO John Matze, companies with enough firepower to host the platform don’t want to be associated with bigotry. 

Platforming white supremacy and hate speech is a tougher proposition than serving users pirated copies of the Prince discography. But Kolmisoppi was quick to laugh at the fact that despite being backed by billionaires and parts of the US government, Parler didn’t seem remotely prepared for the justified firestorm it found itself at the center of. 

“The most ironic thing is that The Pirate Bay’s enemies include not just the US government but also many European and the Russian one,” he said. “Compared to gab/parlor which is supported by the current president of the US and probably liked by the Russian one too.”

Over the years, Kolmisoppi and The Pirate Bay crew explored no limit of strategies to keep its servers operational and out of the reach of law enforcement and the entertainment industry, even when that meant hiding them in caves and submarines, or even using low-orbit drones to redirect users to hidden regional servers hosting torrent indexes and trackers.

The organizations shift to magnet links in 2012 helped make it more difficult to take offline. And despite numerous trials, fines, multi-country IP address blockades, police raids, and even a stretch in prison, the website he originally co-founded on a shoestring budget remains more or less operational.

In contrast, Parler lost its primary cloud service provider and simply disappeared, seemingly incapable of any adaptation. Meanwhile, thanks to sloppy coding and substandard security standards, researchers are hard at work scraping publicly-available Parler data to help identify platform users who thought it might be fun to flirt with violent sedition on live television.

“In all honesty, the reason we did The Pirate Bay was to bring freedom and take back control from a centralised system,” Kolmisoppi said. “The reason that Gab et al will fail is because they're just whining bitches that have only one ideology: egotism. Sharing is caring y'all.”

In more recent years, Kolmoisoppi has moved on to fund Njalla, a privacy-centric domain name registration service. One he says was already asked to host Parler, and refused. 

“Of course we wouldn't,” Kolmisoppi said. “We're pro human rights, which includes the right to not be killed by extreme right wing terrorists.”