New Megaupload To Launch On Police Raid Anniversary
With 50 million visitors per day at its peak, Megaupload was one of the largest websites on the Internet. — This abruptly ended January this year when the U.S. Government took down the file-hosting service and had several key employees arrested including founder Kim Dotcom.
Context & Ripple Effects
Kim Dotcom's January arrest left a vacuum in file hosting almost immediately: TorrentFreak documented upheaval across warez sites within days, and Wired reported rivals like Putlocker and RapidShare picking up Megaupload's slack by March. Dotcom himself has been fighting the case on procedural ground, having defeated US government attempts to return him to prison in February, while the judge presiding over the case suggested in April that a trial might never happen.
The relaunch announcement — confirmed for the raid anniversary — is therefore less a comeback than a provocation timed for maximum symbolic effect: the same founder, the same category, on the one-year mark of the takedown, with his legal status still unresolved.
First-order effects
- Mega's relaunch puts Kim Dotcom back in commercial operation while under US indictment, handing prosecutors a fresh target even as the original case drags without a firm trial date.
- Users and uploaders get a sanctioned successor service from day one, competing directly with the hosts like Putlocker and RapidShare that absorbed displaced traffic after the January raid.
Second-order effects
- Rival file-hosting services face a brand with proven 50-million-daily-visitor demand re-entering the market, pressuring their own terms-of-service and takedown postures.
- Payment processors and advertisers will have to decide whether to serve the new Mega, repeating the chokepoint decisions that shaped which services survived after the original bust.
Third-order effects
- If the new Mega sustains legal operations through an unresolved criminal case, it becomes a test of whether enforcement-by-seizure can permanently remove a popular cloud service or only redistribute its traffic.
- A successful anniversary relaunch would harden the playbook for founders facing government takedowns: rebuild under a new domain, lean on public sympathy, and litigate in parallel rather than wait for acquittal.
The trend: Cloud storage is splitting into enforcement-hardened incumbents and founder-led relaunch brands that treat prosecution as a marketing event rather than an endpoint.