PRQ

PeRiQuito 

AB (PRQ) is a Swedish Internet service provider and web hosting company created in 2004 which became famous for hosting the BitTorrent website The Pirate Bay. PRQ also hosts The Piracy Bureau, Wikileaks,

some pedophile forums including NAMBLA, and also hosted the Kavkaz Center.

PRQ was owned by Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm, but was sold to Zenon Panoussis.

Business model

Part of PRQ's business model is to host any customers regardless of how odd or controversial they may be, as long as the hosted sites follow Swedish laws. PRQ quotes the New York Times as stating that the "PRQ has gone out of its way to host sites that other companies would not touch. It is perhaps the world's least lawyer-friendly hosting company". The PRQ service has been described as "highly secure, no-questions-asked hosting services". The company is reported to hold almost no information about its clientele and is maintaining few if any of its own logs.

Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm are said to have amassed "considerable expertise in withstanding legal attacks from powerful corporate interests". Svartholm is quoted to have said "We do employ our own legal staff. We are used to this sort of situation" in a telephone interview.Due to hosting The Pirate Bay, PRQ was target of a May 2006 police raid.

Ownership

Since February 2009, Gottfrid Svartholm along with other old employees are no longer working with PRQ. Around the same time the company went through changes in infrastructure, updated their website, started offering dedicated servers along with co-hosting and changed from personal support manager to the more generally used ticket system. This is relevant to news from late 2008, stating "PRQs activities have now been sold to a group of foreign investors. Activities will continue just as before but the daily operation will not be handled by the same people except for a transitional period. The main difference will be that it now has much better resources.". Before this move, it is thought that PRQ generated loss of income for their owners and was run more as a hobby to provide free speech hosting to whoever needed it. With the new ownership this is expected to continue while turning the company to make profit.

Source:PRQ