Mega Puts Pressure on Popular Cloud Services

This chart shows the free storage offered by popular cloud storage services.

This weekend, (in)famous tech entrepreneur Kim Dotcom launched his new website Mega.

Mega, a cloud storage service, is the de-facto successor to MegaUpload, the file hosting site that was shut down by the U.S. government a year ago. The new service uses encryption to protect users’ privacy and to deflect liability away from the site’s operators. Dotcom expects his new site to be heavily scrutinized by lawmakers and stated that “every single pixel on that site has been looked at by lawyers”.

DotCom, a German native born Kim Schmitz, faces copyright allegations in the United States for operating MegaUpload, as the service was allegedly used to exchange millions worth of pirated music, movies and TV shows. Dotcom currently resides in New Zealand, while the U.S. Justice Department is trying to get him extradited to the United States to stand trial.

However controversial Dotcom’s decision to launch a new service is, Mega is already making a splash in the cloud storage space. While most competitors have limited their free services to 5 gigabytes or less, Mega offers its users 50 gigabytes of free storage, and within two hours after its launch the service had already reached 250,000 registrations.