The official reason is due to a Turkish Digital TV provider claiming that some bloggers are streaming live football via their blogs. Despite being impossible, this motive also seems rather improbable. To shut down an entire arm of Google and millions of blogs simply because of a couple of breaches of copyright seems akin to "throwing the baby out with the bath water" or, as they say in Turkey, "pouring water in the donkey's fanny".
I think the more likely reason is someone has said something that someone didn't like. Can I be more vague? Perhaps, but I think you get what I'm saying.
This habit of banning websites willy nilly is starting to get on my tits. I would expect such behaviour from more paranoid nations (North Korea, Iran et al) but I had this strange belief that Turkey was a forward-looking country with sights on becoming a challenger in the digital arena. Is it bollocks.
I was interviewed by the Hurriyet Daily News about my opinions on the ban. You can read my teetering steps into celebrity here.
Oh, and if you're wondering how I'm managing to write this... I'm doing what I did last year when the YouTube ban was in place... I'm using a proxy to fool the internet police into thinking I'm in Belarus. Wish I fucking was.
3 comments:
I'm also trying hard not to read something scary into all of this, but it troubles me that I can't reach my blog from home on any DNS, but I can reach it from work on the regular automatic DNS.
Then there's this weird thing that happened to my site last week...
http://istanbuls-stranger.blogspot.com/2011/03/banned-in-turkey-again.html
Good luck, and congrats on the newspaper spread!
Is the blogger ban in Turkey still in effect? I'm going to be in Turkey for a month this summer, and was hoping to blog while I was there. Are other blogging sites, such as Wordpress, banned? Thanks.
I love your blog. You are a late 19th Century ethnographer reborn and have taught me so much. Thank you.
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