Saturday, April 7, 2007

Turkey decides to block offending web sites

The China experiment seems to be catching on. China has a large number of people employed for the purpose of monitoring web sites, chat sites and other internet medium so that political and other information deemed unworthy for the Chinese people is filtered out (blocked). Saudi Arabia also carries out this policy, blocking content deemed unworthy or that could lead to political unrest. Iran also has persecuted bloggers.
Turkey has always been seen to be a more forward country, a modern progressive country. But it also has a clause in the penal system that forbids any denigration of Turkey. So, taking this a step forward, a parliamentary commission has introduced a proposal to block web sites that denigrate Turkey in any way. If this proposal gets approved by parliament, then Turkey will join the list of illustrious countries that believes that its citizens should be deprived of some news.
One always do such policies, but are they truly sustainable? China and Saudi Arabia have shown that such policies are sustainable if you throw enough people at it, and bring in the element of terror if you violate these policies, but one wonders whether Turkey wants to get into this sort of thing.

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