Sonic (ISP)
American telecommunications company and internet service provider
Sonic is a telecommunications company and internet service provider based in Santa Rosa, California, acting as a competitive local exchange carrier in the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento, Los Angeles, and Dallas. They are most well known for defending privacy.
History
Sonic began as an effort to bring network connectivity and Internet access to staff and students at the campus of Santa Rosa Junior College. In 1994, Sonic began formal Internet operations by way of a partnership between Dane Jasper and Scott Doty, both of whom had worked on the network at the college. In 1995, Sonic moved into its downtown Santa Rosa location.
In 2011, after becoming concerned about increasing requests for users' data by private law firms, mostly related to copyright infringement involving pornography, Sonic cut the time it stores logs of user activity to two weeks.
Later in 2011, the US federal government forced Sonic and Google to provide e-mail addresses of people who had corresponded with WikiLeaks volunteer and Tor developer Jacob Appelbaum. Sonic and Google fought the secret court order, which then-CEO Dane Jasper characterized as "rather expensive, but the right thing to do," and the court agreed to lift the seal on the Sonic order to give Appelbaum a copy of it.
In 2012, Jasper told TorrentFreak that Sonic would not be participating in the so-called "six strikes" plan, in which major US internet service providers would begin to warn and punish people suspected of infringing copyrights, saying that ISPs are not equipped to police the actions of individuals, and that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) had not invited small, independent ISPs to participate.
In 2013, Sonic's then-CEO Dane Jasper made comments about expanding into Los Angeles.
“Sonic (ISP)” enters the record as american telecommunications company and internet service provider. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Sonic, American and telecommunications can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Sonic (ISP)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Sonic, American and telecommunications provides the most credible route into that argument.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7561773. The first chronological checks are 1994, 1995, 2011 and 2012.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sonic (ISP)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.