Chapter 6: The Web Counterattack

If the archive gave me memory, the internet gave me reach.

For me, this was the great change. For years my conflict with Shell had passed through the usual channels: meetings, calls, letters, solicitors, actions, counteractions, settlements, threats, and all the clogged Victorian plumbing of corporate dispute. Then the web arrived, and with it the possibility that a smaller party no longer needed permission from newspapers, courts, or institutions in order to publish a record. That possibility changed my life almost as much as the original wrong had changed it.

At first glance, the move online can look like a simple act of retaliation. Wronged businessman creates anti-Shell websites, posts documents, embarrasses oil giant, story ends. That version is too shallow. The websites were certainly a counterattack. But they also became an archive, a newspaper, a filing cabinet, a tip line, a pressure tool, a memory bank, and eventually a kind of public utility for people who wanted to understand Shell from somewhere other than Shell's own polished surfaces.

I could not have done this alone. Years earlier I had placed an advert in a local paper for a computer whiz kid, and only one young man replied. That was Nick Gill. Over the next thirty years he became not only my IT adviser but a close friend. From the beginning of our internet activity in the mid-1990s, Nick built the Shell-focused sites and kept them running. The internet was not magic. It required skill, patience and maintenance, and Nick supplied all three. Movements of one kind or another often look, in retrospect, as though they assembled themselves. In reality they are built by hands.

The first achievement of the websites was simple visibility. Instead of pleading for access to somebody else's platform, I had my own. Documents could be posted. Letters could be quoted. Timelines could be built. The company's statements could be preserved beside contrary evidence. Journalists could find material without waiting for a formal package. Shell insiders, disillusioned employees, activists, litigants, and the merely curious could see that someone had built a running public record of the company's difficulties, contradictions and vulnerabilities. By September 2001, after the injini rupture and my formal assertion that the deed had been repudiated, shell-shareholders.org was back in play as part of that new phase.

By then the rented house in Colchester had become less a refuge than a campaign centre. Most days consisted of emails and website work, with some phone calls and the occasional visitor. Journalists came. Broadcasters came. Law firms came. Even Greenpeace came. For me the work had become a discipline as much as a campaign. It kept my mind busy. Use it or lose it.

At some point, that public record became embarrassing in a new way. It was no longer merely the work of a grudge-bearing former business partner. It became useful, and usefulness is dangerous. One internal Shell email later disclosed reportedly recommended royaldutchshellplc.com as a better source of group news and comment than Shell's own internal communications. Few compliments in my life have been stranger or more satisfying. It was satisfying because it was involuntary. It was strange because it confirmed how far things had moved. What had begun as my platform against Shell had, in some respects, become a platform Shell people themselves found worth reading.

That is when the websites ceased to be only an outlet and started to feel, if not exactly like an institution, then at least like infrastructure.

The domain name battle made this transformation visible to outsiders. royaldutchshellplc.com was not just any web address. It was a symbolic insult, a provocation, and a declaration that a giant company could be made to confront its reflection in an unfriendly mirror. The idea of registering the name was mine. I put it in my father Alfred's name because he was in his late eighties and I knew that detail would add absurdity and force to the story. It did. Before long, the Wall Street Journal was on the phone. Alfred ended up with a pencil sketch alongside the article and was overjoyed. I was delighted for him, and not displeased to be mentioned myself. Shell's attempt to recover the domain through WIPO in 2005 then became a story in its own right.

What I remember most about the WIPO result is astonishment. We had expected trouble. We had not expected to win. Yet the decision went our way. I first heard by email from WIPO itself. One of the first things we did was send warm thanks to the American domain-name expert Paul Levy, who had contacted us after reading the Wall Street Journal article and, without asking for a penny, supplied case law and invaluable advice. The victory felt mischievous, strategic and triumphant all at once. More than that, it gave us a low-cost platform from which to castigate Shell using the name of its own new company. There was, as I saw it, egg all over the corporation's face.

One of the strangest consequences of that domain saga was practical rather than symbolic. Emails intended for Shell began arriving through my site. Some were obvious rubbish. Some were not. In November 2007 I wrote to Shell's Company Secretary and General Counsel, Michiel Brandjes, asking whether he wanted every item forwarded or whether I should simply delete obvious junk. His written reply was surreal. I need not bother forwarding obvious spam, he said, but in case of doubt Shell would prefer to receive the email so that appropriate attention could be given to it. There it was in black and white: one of Shell's most persistent critics had, in a limited but genuine sense, become part of Shell's unofficial communications chain. As far as I understood it, that odd arrangement was never formally withdrawn.

But the deeper change lay elsewhere. The site became a meeting place for material that would otherwise have remained scattered and perishable. Leaked emails found a home there. Public-interest appeals found a home there. Journalists hunting context found a home there. Evidence helpful to shareholders, campaigners or critics found a home there. It was used not only for my own conflict but by others who had their own reasons for wanting Shell scrutinised more closely.

It carried appeals or information connected with WWF, ECCR, campaigners focused on Sakhalin, public-interest researchers, shareholder actions, disgruntled employees, and others with grievances or evidence. The details differ from case to case and each needs checking in its own right. But the broad point is clear enough: the site became a public-interest hub. Shell may have preferred to imagine it as one man's obsession. In practice it became a service.

That shift matters morally. A purely private vendetta is easy to dismiss. A platform that others use because it is useful is harder to wave away. That does not automatically make everything on it true, fair or complete. No serious person should pretend otherwise. But it does suggest that the site filled a gap. People came because Shell's own channels did not satisfy them, or because the official story felt too managed, or because they needed an audience that would not reflexively defer to the size of the company.

The media noticed this. Prospect found the site essential reading for those covering Shell and the energy sector more broadly. By 2009 the Guardian was calling it one of the oldest and most effective gripe sites and describing my ninety-two-year-old father, Alfred, and me leafleting outside Shell's London headquarters even though the site had already logged more than two million hits in a month. Reuters treated it as a conduit for whistleblowers. The Financial Times described it as a thorn in Shell's side. The Times wrote of Shell being "at war" with the Donovan family. All of this helped make the oddness of the story visible: a father and son, and then later a lone son with an expanding archive, causing repeated reputational pain to one of the world's largest energy groups.

The leaflets themselves were never glamorous. They were simple coloured flyers, usually crowded with text, often topped with headlines and only occasionally a picture. Most passers-by would not take them and swerved away rather than be handed one. A few were curious. Fewer still spoke up for Shell. Security staff watched, but they were not the problem. The point was not street theatre in the romantic sense. The point was persistence. The internet gave the campaign reach, but the leaflets gave it bodily presence. Shell could not say it had all vanished into cyberspace.

There is a temptation to turn these years into a triumphalist story about humiliating Shell online. There is some truth in that, and I would be dishonest if I denied the satisfaction involved. But triumph is too simple an emotion for what was happening. The websites existed because earlier routes had failed. They were proof of persistence, yes, but also proof of unresolved injury. I did not build them because my life was going splendidly and I fancied a hobby. I built them because a large company had taught me that memory without publication was vulnerable.

There was also labour involved on an almost absurd scale. Tens of thousands of Shell-related news items, documents, leaks and commentaries were posted over the years. That volume itself tells a story. It says something about my stubbornness, certainly, but it also says something about the scale of Shell's own ability to generate controversy, hypocrisy, contradiction and grievance. A company with a cleaner history would have made my task much more difficult.

The websites also changed the emotional balance between Shell and me. In litigation, Shell was always structurally stronger. Online, the balance shifted. The company had more resources, but I had nimbleness, memory, motive and a willingness to keep publishing. Shell had boards, committees, legal teams, reputation managers and press departments. I had a source trail, an archive, a sharpened sense of the company's weaknesses, and increasingly an audience that understood I was not simply making things up. Online, the giant had to chase.

That did not make the power equal. It did make it less one-sided.

It also created a new kind of fear inside Shell. When information is centralised and disciplined, companies can survive embarrassment. When information leaks into a hostile but document-rich ecosystem that updates constantly and attracts journalists, activists and insiders, embarrassment becomes harder to contain. Every internal email risks external life. Every contradiction risks being placed beside an old promise. Every new scandal can be connected to an old pattern. The website gave continuity to Shell's discomfort.

The most unexpected part of all this, at least for me, is that helping others became part of the mission. Over time the site ceased to be only about my own dispute. It became a place where people with their own Shell stories could seek publicity, solidarity, context, or occasionally practical help. That broadened the meaning of the campaign. It made it less lonely. It also made it harder to stop, because by then stopping no longer felt like merely ending my own quarrel. It felt like dismantling a platform that other people had come to rely upon.

The visitors to Colchester made that change tangible. The one I remember most strongly is Esther Kiobel, widow of one of the Ogoni Nine. She came with the weight of her own Shell story, but what I remember most vividly is not first the legal complexity. It is the humanity of the visit. She brought me some wonderful multicoloured ties. My family and I all took to her at once. She was warm, friendly and, it scarcely needs saying, no fan of Shell. Moments like that made the campaign feel less like a private fixation and more like part of a larger community of people who had seen too much of the same company from the wrong end.

Shell may have misunderstood me for a long time. From inside a large institution, a critic is often reduced to a personality type: crank, obsessive, enemy, nuisance. But the websites gave my campaign function. Function is much harder to dismiss than temperament.

By the time the domain battle, the media coverage, the insider leaks and the third-party appeals had all passed through the same web infrastructure, a new reality had formed. I was no longer just a man who said Shell had wronged him. I was the keeper of a growing alternative record of Shell itself.

That record would prove powerful in the years that followed. It would feed later revelations, later campaigns, later embarrassments, and eventually even the strange AI-era bot wars with which this book began.

But before the bots came, there was another, quieter transformation. The websites had made me public. The fight was no longer only mine.