Dotcom’s Me.Ga already in trouble

While Kim Dotcom announced just over a week ago that the spiritual successor to Megaupload, Mega, would use not only encryption to protect users and those that run the site from prosecution, but would have the domain name Me.ga, it has already run into a few problems. The country where the domain is held, has said it plans to seize the digital property and a hacking group has taken control of it, showing its distaste for the legally embattled entrepreneur.

Me.ga is a domain hosted in Gabon, a small West African nation that borders Congo. With a national domain like .ga, it's understandable why Dotcom's new business wanted to make use of it. However now the country's communications minister has issued the following statement: “I have instructed my departments to immediately suspend the site www.me.ga. Gabon cannot serve as a platform or screen for committing acts aimed at violating copyrights, nor be used by unscrupulous people.”

Dotcom's response to this suggested that since American company Vivendi has direct control over the country's Top Level Domain system through one of its subsidiaries, that the US may be behind the move.

However the site faces perhaps a bigger threat in the form of a hacking group known as Omega. While the Me.ga domain name now appears to be down, for most of today it has been redirecting to Ome.ga, a site also based in Gabon.

The group released several statements, many of them hitting out at Dotcom. One compared him to Universal Studios: “Kim Dotcom is only taking advantage of us all, he is a megalomaniac with lawyers here to take advantage of us all, the nobodies, the artists he wants to profit from. Kim Dotcom is not better nor worse than Universal. He himself is an industry, only here to pollute,” the group said while speaking with TorrentFreak.

It also offered to sell the domain to Kim Dotcom's enemies, with some of the proceeds going to charity and has been tweeting from a newly created account twitter.com/o.

Dotcom has said he plans to use an alternative domain until this issue is fixed.

KitGuru Says: Dotcom is often presented by publications and commenters as some sort of folk hero. Omega clearly thinks otherwise. Where do the Kitguru readers stand? Is Dotcom facing up to the big business, or is he simply the left hand to their right?

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