The Little ISP That Stood Up to the Government

When Twitter fought a court order for information from the accounts of several WikiLeaks supporters, it was lauded by Wired.com as having “beta-tested a spine.”

The latest entry into the list of companies with a “spine” is tiny Sonic.net Inc., a Santa Rosa, Calif.-based Internet provider with about 36,000 customers. Sonic not only fought a secret court order for information from WikiLeaks supporter Jacob Appelbaum, but also spoke out about it.

So, who are these Sonic guys?

Sonic was founded in 1994 by Dane Jasper and Scott Doty when they were computer science students at Santa Rosa Junior College. They had been running the campus student e-mail service, and eventually decided to drop out of college to try to build a business offering Internet access accounts for $2 a month, according to the company’s corporate history.

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