Turkey has blocked blooger.com

(Cartoon by Cem Yalcin; "“Testing, 1,2 , ich bin haynnin siwanynin, hmm, sound test 1,2,3,4, Heil Tayyipler, hmm this will succeed!”)

Turkey has added a new worldwide known blog base; blogger.com to the internet banning history of the country on this Friday. Bloger.com is a blog publishing system first crated by Pyra Labs. and owned by Google in 2003.

Today, many internet users in the country were shocked to see that they can not access to Blogger.com which is was ranked 16 on the list of top 50 domains in terms of number of unique visitors in 2007 in the world.

Millions of blog user updating their sited regularly and sharing new ideas, publishing their own thoughts, sometimes about minor things about daily life but sometimes about the news which are skipped by the main stream TV channels and newspapers in the world.

According to the news of Today’s Zaman; “there are currently 853 Web sites banned in Turkey, including video-sharing site Youtube and dailymotion.com, placing Turkey in the league of countries such as China and Saudi Arabia, famous for restricting freedom of speech.”

Local Criminal Courts of Turkey do have the right to ban a web site and some of the sites have been banned without no justification such as gundemonline.com. The sites are generally banned on the grounds of claims of insulting the founding father and the First President of Turkish Republic Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, or having sexual content, containing violence, gambling etc. Youtube.com was banned more than six months this year and now the world wide meeting point of blog users; www.blogger.com is also banned. No justification has been made by the court yet on the ground of the decision.

Turkey is not alone in its antidemocratic attempt to ban the free thought and expression right of internet users in the world. China, Armenia, Iran, Tunisia, Indonesia, Syria and Saudi Arabia have the similar kinds of banning record.
Government of Turkey, does not seem to be taking any part in making regulations in order to put Turkey into the league of shame in 21st century and more than the videos of insulting Ataturk, current ruling politicians of Turkey seems to be disturbed by the criticisms they are receiving from internet.

Prime Minister Erdogan also known as taking Musa Kart and his newspaper, Cumhuriyet, to court after he was portrayed as a cat entangled in a ball of wool. He also launched a lawsuit against a small, local newspaper, Sakarya, which reprinted the cartoon. Few weeks ago, he also called the whole nation to protest and not to buy and read the newspapers owned by Aydin Dogan. It is highly luckily that Justice and Development Party this time is disturbed by the bloggers writing against them.



There are still ways to access to banned sites

Thanks to international platforms such as ktunnel.com and vtunnel.com which allow internet users of Turkey to access the banned sites. Because of the banning of the courts well known web sites, popularity of the bridge web sites has increased rapidly and according to the statistics of August, they are ranked as 37th most visited sites.
Gokhan KURTARAN