The hearing also applies to his co-accused former Megaupload partners, Bram Van der Kolk, Matthias Ortmann and Finn Batato. The U.S. indicted them for money-laundering, copyright infringement and racketeering related to the enormously successful file-sharing site Megaupload.

If you don't remember how big Megaupload was, at one time it had 50 million users a day and comprised 4% of the Internet.

The New Zealand High Court ruled last December after an 8 week hearing that Dotcom and his co-accused could be extradited.

This case is now almost five years old. The much publicized and criticized raids in New Zealand (parts of which a Judge ruled were illegal) at the behest of the U.S. were in January, 2012.

New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) illegally intercepted Dotcom and co-defendant van der Kolk's communications. Dotcom sued and received an official apology from the Prime Minister. After that, the GCSB issued an apology letter:

“I am very sorry for the way the Bureau has handled its part in the Dotcom case. I have apologized on behalf of the Bureau to the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister, and the Prime Minister’s own statement has made clear his views.”

“We got this wrong. Both factual errors and unacceptable errors of legal interpretation were compounded, most especially by our treating those interpretations as fact for too long. It should not have happened.”

My view in a nutshell: If extradited, tried and convicted, U.S. taxpayers will pay a price tag of $128,000. a year to warehouse these four men (Per the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts, June 24, 2016, the annual cost of housing a prisoner at a Bureau of Prisons facility is $31,976.00.) For what? Creating and running the most successful file uploading and sharing business ever? Assuming Dotcom and his partners improperly allowed some site users to share copyrighted material, for which Hollywood is owed money, the remedy is simple: Sue them. Prison is not the answer to every conceivable economic and social ill.

As his lawyers have pointed out:

The U.S. government’s case against Megaupload is grounded in a theory of criminal secondary copyright infringement. In other words, the prosecution seeks to hold Megaupload and its executives criminally responsible for alleged infringement by the company’s third-party cloud storage users. The problem with the theory, however, is that secondary copyright infringement is not – nor has it ever been – a crime in the United States. The federal courts lack any power to criminalize secondary copyright infringement; the U.S. Congress alone has such authority, and it has not done so. As such, the Megaupload prosecution is not only baseless, it is unprecedented.

As Kim Dotcom reminds us:

The U.S. is acting like Global Holy Warriors. It is using the criminal justice system to do Hollywood's bidding. The cost is enormous. Good luck to Team Dotcom.