Dr.Arif Yildirim, Contributor:
“As more people use the internet to communicate, obtain information, socialize, and conduct, commerce, governments have stepped up efforts to regulate, and in some instances tightly control, the new medium. Reports of website blocking and filtering, content manipulation, attacks on and imprisonment of bloggers, and cyberattacks have all increased sharply in recent years” shows how the internet freedom is in danger by a new report on cyber liberty titled Freedom on the Net 2011. Freedom House searchs Internet free speech in 37 countries and twelve of them states cyberattacks to their significant regimes are “intensifying”. In addition, it’s odd that Sweden isn’t in the research. We know that Sweden is the host of Wikileaks and in last days there was a P2P group registered a new religion which called Kopimism specified “Information technology is not to be feathered by laws.”
As specified in the report that countries with at least partially centralized and government-controlled internet connections are: Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, Venezuela, Vietnam, Zimbabwe.
*A green-colored bar represents a status of “Free,” a yellow-colored one, the status of “Partly Free,” and a purple-colored one, the status of “Not Free” on the Freedom of the Net Index.
For Turkey; it shows the real tragedy about the internet freedom, nothing changed since 2009 to these days. Still Turkish people use the most expensive internet in the world. As stated in the report that countries with substantial censorship of political or social issues in 2009–10: Bahrain, Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Ethiopia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Thailand, Tunisia,Turkey, Vietnam. So world 16th biggest economy doesn’t deserve it place in this report. Somethings must change immediately.
TURKEY
Internet and mobile-telephone use in Turkey has grown significantly in recent years, surpassing one third of the population in 2009, though access remains a challenge in some parts of the country. Since 2001, the government has taken considerable legal steps to limit access to certain information, including some political content. According to various estimates, there were over 5,000 blocked websites as of July 2010, an increase from 2008, spurring street demonstrations against internet censorship. In addition, certain applications, particularly file-sharing sites like YouTube, Last.fm, and Metacafe, as well as some Google-related services, have been repeatedly blocked. The YouTube block was eventually lifted in November 2010, but only after disputed videos were removed or made unavailable within the country. Despite a restrictive legal environment, the Turkish blogosphere is vibrant and diverse. Bloggers have critiqued even sensitive government policies and sought to raise public awareness about censorship and surveillance practices, yielding at least one parliamentary inquiry into the latter.
The second “Arab Revolution” contributor Egypt will show how internet is free after they build the new regime. From that it doesn’t show the real situation in Egypt.
EGYPT
While the Egyptian government has aggressively and successfully sought to expand access to the internet as an engine of economic growth, its security forces also intensified attempts to curtail the use of new technologies for disseminating and receiving sensitive political information in 2009 and 2010. They typically employ such “low-tech” methods as intimidation, legal harassment, detentions, and real-world surveillance of online dissidents. However, in response to increased internet-based activism, particularly in advance of the November 2010 parliamentary elections, the authorities began to engage in greater censorship of online communications. Several individuals who called for political change and democratic reform saw their websites shut down and two popular Facebook groups used for organizing protests were temporarily removed. With Emergency Law provisions in place, Egypt’s legal environment remained harsh and several bloggers were detained during the coverage period, with one nearly tried before a military tribunal. In 2010, Egypt also saw the first court case in which a judge found a cybercafe owner liable for defamatory information posted online by a visitor to his shop.
Former Soviet Union countries which contributed to this report are Estonia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus. There is too interesting result for this region, one is Estonia as a future leader of the IT Sector and second is Belarus which acted like China, Iran, Ethiopia etc.
ESTONIA
Estonia ranks among the most wired and technologically advanced countries in the world. In 2009, over 91 percent of citizens filed their taxes online and Estonian identity cards were used to facilitate electronic voting during municipal and European Parliament elections. Restrictions on internet content and communications are among the lightest in the world. Nevertheless, in January 2010, a new law on online gambling came into force, requiring all domestic and foreign gambling sites to obtain a special license or face access restrictions. The most serious threat to internet freedom in Estonia emerged in late April and early May 2007, when a campaign of cyberattacks targeted various Estonian institutions and infrastructures. Given the absence of such a large-scale attack in 2009-2010, and the subsequent restrictions it posed for access to important information, Estonia’s score showed improvement during the coverage period. In addition, the experience led to increased awareness of the dangers of cyberattacks and a greater policy focus on improving technical competencies to make the internet more secure.
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