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what it took to develop and launch a business built around a technologically advanced product with limited resources while under threat of extradition.

“It just shuts them up,” says Dotcom. “Anyone who looks at this sees we are gifted individuals with the capacity to create products that are successful because they are innovative. This is an important thing for us. We have always been innovators, always been on the cutting edge of developing cool stuff that brings the internet and society forward. We saw this whole development of Mega as liberation through innovation. We wanted to educate people and show people what we are capable of — that we are not this criminal mafia organisation that the US government wants everyone to believe that we are.”

“We are talented young people that come up with the most advanced, cutting edge, technology in the online world. We have proven that to ourselves and to everyone out there with the release of this site.”

“Megaupload was not successful because we built that for pirates. It was successful because it was a ground-breaking innovation at the time which was solving the problem of attaching large files that you couldn’t send via email. It started with a very simple thought and it became something very powerful.”

“And this new Mega, I think, has the potential to be much bigger than anything I’ve done in the past.”

The prospect of a website which could shut government out of our lives seemed to attract a legislative answer. The New Zealand government launched the Telecommunications (Interception Capability and Security) Bill, which forced anybody providing communications technology to give the GCSB a backdoor into it. Critics called it the Mega Bill as if it were designed to undermine the encryption product created as a result of the 20 January raid.

Irrelevant, says Dotcom, because the public will decide. “The internet is actually the most democratic place in the world. It is the people regulating it and doing what they think is right. There is this thing called the invisible hand — that’s the movement of society which is always looking for the most efficient ways of doing things. There is a certain flow which comes naturally with society.”

“When you try to block that, when you think you can get in the way of that and destroy that for everybody, society will rebel. There will be parts of society that develop solutions to get around that.”

The more the US — and its allied nations — fight the invisible hand, the more they will find IT leadership slips away. “And what they do by attacking legitimate players like us, they force innovation that is going to overcome their methods of attack to a point where the cat and mouse game is over and technology wins.”

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