Mainstream Media (media group)

With the ownership of Mainstream Media being Australian,[13] the initial site launched was Australian News.Net. New Zealand News.Net followed. By the end of 1999 the group had established sites for all countries in Asia including China News.Net, Singapore News.Net, Hong Kong News.Net, Thailand News.Net, Indonesia News.Net, and Pakistan News.Net. The inventory also included city sites such as Beijing News.Net, Shanghai News.Net, Seoul News.Net, Bangkok News.Net, Mumbai News.Net and Taipei News.Net. With events heating up in the Middle East, Israel News.Net, Palestinian News.Net and Middle East News.Net followed, then the network extended to the United States with US News.Net, New York City News.Net, Miami News.Net, Chicago News.Net, Los Angeles News.Net, and Houston News.Net among others coming on stream. In all, more than 60 of the group's sites are U.S. sites. Europe News.Net was then established together with a string of sites related to European countries and cities. Surprisingly Mainstream appears to own news.net domain names for almost all regions, countries and cities around the world.[14]

The group's Afghanistan news website attracted hundreds of thousands of unique visitors in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, largely because of the understanding Osama bin Laden had launched the attacks from his base in Afghanistan. Afghanistan News.Net received thousands of angry and abusive emails and posts on its chat board, while hackers eventually took the site down, which resulted in the entire Mainstream Media network going down.[15] The United States Library of Congress included Afghanistan News.Net in its 11 September Web Archive of sites portraying expressions of individuals, groups, media and institutions in the wake of the 11 September attacks.[16]

Afghanistan News.Net is also a selected Internet resource on Afghanistan for Berkeley Library.[17]

In August 2006 Mainstream Media's two hundred news portals went offline for several days when the domain name on which its Toronto-based servers were hosted was stolen and sold on eBay for $20,000. Mainstream sued several parties in California where the domain, www.fm.net, was registered. Shortly before the case was concluded the 'buyer' transferred the domain name to Afriregister S.A., a little-known domain name registry in Burundi, in Africa, which took the case out of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California jurisdiction.[18]

New South Wales, Australia Police investigated the theft of the domain name and arrested a former Mainstream employee working in the company's Sydney office who had hacked into Mainstream's computer system and transferred the domain to a fictitious person in July 2006. A month later the man sold the domain on eBay for $20,000. He was convicted and sentenced to community service and ordered to pay restitution of $25,800. The money was never paid.[19] Today Mainstream uses its corporate site to host its servers.[20]