KUWAIT: Telecom privatization accompanied by crackdown on civil liberties

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | honou

By Alexandra Sandels | Los Angeles Times | November 20, 2010

In the Persian Gulf, at least, capitalism does not equal freedom. 

In Kuwait, the government has announced plans to privatize phone and mail services while at the same time increasing censorship. It has begun shutting down all pornographic websites, and on Saturday, three ministries issued a joint ban on photography cameras with large lenses in public places, according to a Kuwaiti media report.

Kuwait’s communications minister, Al Busairdi, announced plans to privatize landlines and postal services within the next two years, the UAE-based daily Gulf News reported.

A wider crackdown on illicit Web content seems to be part of the package as well. It will partly be conducted with the help of the provider of Blackberry services, Research in Motion, Al Busairdi said.

“The three telecom operators in Kuwait have also decided to install filters to block pornographic sites,” he was quoted as saying by Gulf News. “Kuwait has also reached an agreement with Research in Motion (RIM) to provide information about any phone number, in accordance with the law.”

According to a study conducted last year by the Harvard University-sponsored OpenNet Initiative, Kuwait is one of the quickest-growing telecom markets in the region. But it witnessed a setback in 2007 when one of Kuwait’s largest telecom operators moved its headquarters to Bahrain because of Kuwait’s lack of an independent telecommunications sector, the report said.

The study also said that Kuwait practices selective filtering of Internet content, blocking sites deemed immoral and politically sensitive or considered to foment terrorism. The Kuwaiti censorship apparatus also targets gay and lesbian websites and those that present critical reviews of Islam or religion.

Photographers in Kuwait have also begun to feel the sting from the new ban on the use in public of professional cameras with big lenses, enacted by the ministries of information, social affairs, and finance.

They recently concluded that such photography should be restricted to usage for “journalism purposes only” in public places, including on the streets and in shopping malls, according to the daily Kuwait Times.

Mohamed Eisa, an amateur photographer in Kuwait, told the Kuwait Times that he began to face problems the day he bought his professional camera. Since then, he only takes pictures of animals or still life since “these subjects don’t mind having their picture taken and don’t make a scene.”

Still, the ban appears confusing to some who don’t understand why the authorities would ban only professional cameras and not smaller digital or mobile phone cameras which basically have the same capabilities as the professional ones.

Chinese woman jailed over Twitter post

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | West McGowan

By Damian Grammaticas | BBC News | November 18, 2010

A woman in China has been sentenced to a year in a labour camp after posting a message on the social networking website Twitter.

The fiance of human rights activist Cheng Jianping told the BBC she had been accused of disrupting social order, but her message had been a joke.

She had repeated a Twitter comment urging nationalist protesters to smash Japan’s pavilion at the Shanghai Expo, adding the words “Charge, angry youth”.

Twitter is banned in China.

However, many people use it by circumventing internet controls.

Diplomatic row

The offending online “tweet”, which has landed 46-year-old Cheng Jianping with a year of re-education through labour, was posted in the middle of last month.

At the time, China and Japan were embroiled in their worst diplomatic row in recent years over a group of uninhabited, but disputed, islands in the East China Sea.

Groups of young Chinese had been demonstrating against Japan, publicly smashing Japanese products.

Cheng Jianping’s fiance, Hua Chunhui, told the BBC he first posted the short message on Twitter, ridiculing the demonstrators, saying their actions were nothing new and if they really wanted to make an impact they should smash the Japanese Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo.

Ms Cheng then “retweeted” the mocking message, he said, forwarding it and adding the words “charge, angry youth”.

Ten days later she was detained by police “for disrupting social order” and has now been sent to the Shibali River women’s labour camp in Zhengzhou city in Henan Province.

Mr Hua said his fiance had started a hunger strike and he was trying to get her released to undergo her re-education at home.

Contacted by the BBC, staff at the camp said they had no information to give.

But Mr Hua said documents from the labour re-education committee made it clear Ms Cheng had been committed because of her single “tweet”.

Another Twitter user has now tweeted that Ms Cheng should apply for a place in the Guinness Book of World Records, because the five words she added to the message had cost her a year of freedom.

Dissidents

Her detention is a sign of how closely China’s government scrutinises comment on the internet.

The authorities are fearful of the power of the internet to stir up discontent.

They are also wary of the way nationalist demonstrations like those targeting Japan have the potential to run out of control.

Ms Cheng may also have been targeted because she is a local human rights activist.

Her fiance said she had signed petitions including one calling for the release of China’s jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo.

And she had been detained by police for five days in August this year after she voiced support for Liu Xianbin, a long-time campaigner for democracy in China, involved in the protests that preceded the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.

Liu Xianbin had been detained again this year, apparently suspected of inciting subversion of state power for criticising China’s Communist Party.

Google Accuses China of Violating W.T.O. Rules on Internet Access

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Beijing Patrol

By Keith Bradsher | New York Times | November 16, 2010

HONG KONG — Google has released a policy paper contending that China violates its World Trade Organization commitments by limiting Chinese Internet users’ access to information providers outside China. The assertion, which was published online Monday but went largely unnoticed until bloggers started writing about it Tuesday, is the latest sign of Google’s ever greater willingness to confront censorship in China.

“Invocation of W.T.O. rules suggests that Google is fed up, and willing to play hardball,” said James Seymour, a specialist in Chinese politics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.  

Bob Boorstin, Google’s public policy director, made the free-trade link forcefully in a posting on Google’s public policy blog, although he stopped short of mentioning China specifically.“It’s pretty wonky stuff,” he wrote in a statement posted on the blog with a link to the paper, “but the premise is simple: In addition to infringing human rights, governments that block the free flow of information on the Internet are also blocking trade and economic growth.”Mr. Boorstin went on to call for Western officials to challenge trade barriers to information. “In the paper we’re releasing today, we urge policy makers in the United States, European Union and elsewhere to take steps to break down barriers to free trade and Internet commerce,” Mr. Boorstin wrote.The policy paper said that more than 40 governments around the world now restrict freedom of information on the Internet — which it said was more than a 10-fold increase in the last decade of governments with such restrictions. Many of the examples of restrictions came from Google’s experience in China.Until January, accommodating China’s policy, Google censored search results delivered to computers in China. Stepping back from that approach, the company in March curtailed its operations in China and began directing Internet users there to its site in Hong Kong. A former British colony, Hong Kong maintains freedom of speech and other individual liberties despite its return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.Since March, Google has continued to lobby Beijing, with little success, for unfettered access to the Chinese market.Even before it pulled out of the mainland, Google was losing market share to a Chinese rival, Baidu. And it has lost further market share since then. The latest industry estimates suggest that Google, which before March had about one-third of the mainland market for Internet searches, now has only about one-fifth, with Baidu having the rest.Kaiser Kuo, the director of international communications for Baidu, said that it was wrong to suggest that China’s controls on the Internet were unfairly helping his company.“Google no longer incurs the costs of censorship that we continue to incur; those costs include not only hardware, software and manpower but most importantly the time of our very senior managers,” Mr. Kuo said. “We should not labor under the illusion that censorship is some sort of competitive advantage to Baidu.”Google’s public policy paper emphasized that when the W.T.O. was created in 1995, international free trade rules were broadened in many ways to cover services like Internet search providers. But Chinese officials have consistently said that their commercial policies comply fully with all W.T. O. rules.Google joins a growing chorus of critics of China on trade grounds. The Obama administration opened a broad investigation last month of whether China had violated W.T.O. rules by reportedly subsidizing exports of solar panels, wind turbines and other clean energy products.

Keith Bradsher reported from Hong Kong and Sharon LaFraniere reported from Beijing.

Asia-Pacific Governments Chip Away at Internet Freedom

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Jared Tarbell

By Adrian Addison | AFP | November 5, 2010

HONG KONG (AFP) – The tentacles of government censors are creeping ever further across the web in the Asia-Pacific region as officials from Thailand to Australia try to control what people say and do online.  Aside from China, which has a vast army of censors operating behind what has been dubbed the “Great Firewall”, other countries are also taking steps to restrict access to the Internet.

A massive cyber attack has crippled the web in military-ruled Myanmar ahead of Sunday’s controversial election, IT experts say, raising fears of a deliberate communications blackout for the vote.  But moves to rein in Internet freedoms in other countries in the region are often presented as being well intentioned.

Australia proposes introducing an Internet filter to block sites containing material such as rape, drug use, bestiality and child sex abuse.  Prime Minister Julia Gillard has defended the plan as a moral move which will bring the web into line with TV and film which have long been censored by the state.

“My fundamental outlook is this: it is unlawful for me as an adult to go to a cinema and watch certain sorts of content, it’s unlawful and we believe it to be wrong,” Gillard said recently.  “If we accept that then it seems to me that the moral question is not changed by the medium that the images come through.” 

Yet the plan has been heavily criticised as setting a precedent for censorship and has even been attacked by web giants Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.  Australian anti-censorship campaigner Geordie Guy said while the filter was not designed to control political dissent it was a case of the state “putting its foot down on what the population can see”.

In another Asia-Pacific democracy, the Philippines, several bills have been filed seeking restrictions on the Internet, mainly focused on pornography and the trafficking of women.

And in Thailand, a wide-ranging campaign of government censorship has shut down thousands of Internet sites.  It is a reflection of the deep political divide in the country, where 91 people died and nearly 1,900 were hurt in clashes between Red Shirts and troops during two months of protests, which ended with a bloody army crackdown in May.  Thousands of web pages have also been removed in recent years on the grounds that they were insulting to the Thai royal family.

In April, a Red Shirt sympathiser was arrested and charged for allegedly insulting the monarchy on Facebook — a serious crime punishable by up to 15 years in jail.  He remains in detention awaiting possible trial.  The editor of the popular Prachatai website could face up to 70 years in jail after she was arrested on charges of insulting the monarchy and breaching computer law — for comments posted by users of the site.

John Palfrey, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, says online censorship and surveillance are growing around the world.

“This increase in control is taking place concurrently with the growth of the role that the Internet and digital media are playing in the ways that people live and societies function,” he told AFP.

“Oftentimes, these online controls grow out of well-meaning online protections designed to help keep children safe.  But the same mechanisms that we use to keep our children from unwanted content and contact can be used to keep dissidents from communicating with one another or with the world outside their own society.  The tools that prevent harmful forms of pornography from being published can also keep a political manifesto from reaching its intended audience.  The same tools that bring a terrorist to justice before he can harm his targets can also be used to put a muck-raking journalist in prison for something that she said in an email or a web chat.”

Sometimes calls for censorship of the Internet are for religious reasons.

Hundreds of Indonesian Islamists rallied in central Jakarta in June to demand the stoning to death and public caning of celebrities who allegedly appeared in homemade sex videos circulating online.  About 1,000 protesters led by radical group Hizbut Tahrir shouted “Allahu akbar” (God is greater) and brandished black flags and banners with slogans such as “Arrest those who commit promiscuous sex”.  Hizbut Tahrir spokesman Mohammed Ismail Yusanto said the Internet was a threat to Islamic values in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country.

“The widespread circulation of the celebrity sex videos shows the bad side of uncontrolled information technology, which will surely become one of the most terrible destroyers of morality,” he said.  “Based on sharia law… those who are married should be stoned to death and the unmarried should be caned 100 times in public.  With that kind of punishment it is guaranteed promiscuous sex won’t spread wildly like it is now.”

Radical groups like Hizbut Tahrir have little popular support among Indonesia’s 240 million people in a state which is constitutionally secular and culturally moderate.  But President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has backed calls for tighter controls on the Internet in response to the sex video furore and has warned that the nation risked being “crushed” by the information technology “frenzy”.

While China is a major censor of the Internet in the region, communist Vietnam has also cracked down, arresting bloggers who have criticised the government’s relationship with Beijing.  “Some of the most advanced forms of Internet censorship and surveillance are carried out in Vietnam, following the lead of neighbouring China,” said Harvard University’s Palfrey.

“Over the next five to ten years, I see an escalating struggle between states that wish to control the information environment and citizens who wish to communicate privately and freely with one another.  I expect that we will see substantial growth in the ability of states to listen in on conversations online.”

Italy to Liberalize Wifi Access from 2011: Minister Maroni

By Kee

Flickr Creative Commons | Dave Kellam

AFP | November 5, 2010

ROME (AFP) – Italy will liberalise public wifi access to the Internet from next year, Interior Minister Roberto Maroni said Friday, referring to a much-criticised law restricting wifi connections for security reasons.

The measure “allows us to lift restrictions… that have now been superseded by technological evolution,” Maroni said at a press conference, following a government meeting that approved a package of security-related measures.

Italy in 2005 imposed serious restrictions on wifi access in public places after a series of bomb attacks in London, forcing wifi providers to require documents proving the identity of users and to track their Internet activity.

Antonio Palmieri, a lawmaker from the ruling People of Freedom party, said the removal of the restrictions was “a balanced position that combines requirements for security and for the modernisation of Italy.”

Europe Takes Up Debate on Universal Internet Access

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Sébastien Bertrand

By Kevin J. O’Brien | New York Times | November 7, 2010

BERLIN — The global debate over how access to the Internet should be determined and paid for has attracted free speech advocates, telephone network operators and big online businesses like Google and Facebook.

This week, arguments over so-called network neutrality move to Brussels, where the European Commission and Parliament are holding a daylong meeting that is expected to draw speakers from industry, government and academia.

In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission attempted this year to bar operators — telecommunications and cable companies that offer connections to the Internet — from selectively managing the data flowing over their networks to assure that all customers got adequate service.

The commission tried to prohibit their extracting payment from big traffic generators like Google, but the proposal is bogged down in legal challenges. In Europe, the debate is not as far along, but the outcome is equally clouded.

Important signals about the Continent’s approach may come Thursday from Neelie Kroes, the European commissioner for telecommunications, who is scheduled to speak at the meeting and must report to the Parliament on the status of net neutrality by the end of the year.

In the absence of new regulation, Europe appears to be on track to give mobile network operators a relatively free hand in managing the data flowing over their networks. That could include the imposition of additional charges on rivals, like the voice-over-Internet service Skype.

Ms. Kroes, in public statements this year, has warned operators not to bar rival services from their mobile networks but has not indicated that she intends to push for tighter regulation that would limit the way operators can manage their data traffic.

Jean-Jacques Sahel, the European director of regulatory affairs at Skype, said Ms. Kroes needed to make sure that the 27 E.U. national regulators — who must establish rules by May 1 defining “reasonable” traffic management practices — take an aggressive approach to ensure that operators do not discriminate against rivals.

In most European markets, Mr. Sahel said, operators are still charging an extra fee, usually €10 to €15 a month, or $14 to $21, for customers wishing to use voice-over-Internet services. “This is a form of economic discrimination,” Mr. Sahel said. “The question is: Where will this stop?”

Ms. Kroes declined to comment through a spokesman, Jonathan Todd.

Network operators say that charging mobile consumers for rival services like Skype is widely accepted and that there has been no evidence of widespread censorship or discrimination that would warrant more regulation.

A Sept. 30 report by the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications, the European Union’s telecommunications advisory group, seemed to confirm the industry position, concluding that there was no new need for regulation at this point.

The group, which is made up of the bloc’s national telecommunications regulators, said operators in more than a dozen countries — Austria, Croatia, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Switzerland, France, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland and Britain — had either blocked or throttled services like Skype or file-sharing Web sites. In general, using Skype allows callers to avoid paying the operators for local and long-distance calling; file-sharing sites put steep demands on mobile networks.

But most blocking stopped, the report said, after being reported to local media or regulators.

“To date, the survey carried out by Berec shows that incidents remain few and most of them have been solved voluntarily,” the regulators concluded. “These findings imply that there is currently little reason to undertake any new regulatory measures.”

Pierre Louette, the secretary general for the French carriers division of France Télécom, said extra charges to mobile users wishing to use voice-over-Internet services like Skype were accepted by regulators.

“These charges are considered standard industry practice,” Mr. Louette said during an interview. “We basically have to have the ability to generate revenue from our networks or we won’t be able to create the networks of the future.”

Another issue could present access issues, the regulators warned in their report — the shift away from flat-rate broadband packages to tiered service plans that tie greater speed and access to higher monthly fees. That transition is already under way.

In Spain this year, Vodafone has been testing a series of tiered pricing packages. Richard Feasey, the regulatory policy director at Vodafone, said consumers had reacted positively.

“From what we have seen in the blogs, our customers in Spain appear to be totally comfortable with paying more for greater levels of service,” Mr. Feasey said, comparing graduated Internet service with an airline’s economy, business and first-class ticket prices.

With the debate in flux on both sides of the Atlantic, U.S. operators are weighing in in Europe.

Mick Corkerry, the European executive director for AT&T, is scheduled to speak at the Brussels hearing Thursday. AT&T is a sponsor of a Brussels policy group called the Center for European Policy Studies, which opposes new net neutrality rules on operators.

Andrea Renda, the center’s head of regulatory affairs and a professor of antitrust law at LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome, said more network management regulations would “open a Pandora’s Box of new rules that would inevitably spread to search, apps and cloud computing.”

In the absence of new rules from Brussels, individual European countries will define their own versions of “reasonable” network traffic management, in most cases leaving great discretion to network operators, said Chris Marsden, a senior lecturer on Internet law at the University of Essex in Britain.

So far, only the French regulator, Arcep, has released a set of 10 principles it believes should guide operators’ behavior. In general, it recommended that Internet users be guaranteed the right to send and receive information of their choice and to use the applications and services they want, as long as they do not harm the network. Operators could suppress damaging Internet behavior, Arcep said, as long as the actions taken adhered to principles of relevance, proportionality, nondiscrimination, efficiency and transparency.

“But even Arcep is not proposing to go a step further and set deadlines for compliance and penalties,” Mr. Marsden said.

Even the French approach raises the potential for selective, arbitrary traffic management by network operators, said Jan Philipp Albrecht, a member of the European Parliament from Hanover, Germany, who will also be speaking at the event Thursday.

“The danger is there, because there are no rules on how the priorities should be set from the providers,” he said.

The outcome of the debate also has ramifications for Internet businesses like Google and Facebook, whose popular video-streaming services are generating much of the increased data load being handled by European mobile operators. In the United States, online businesses like Google sought to prohibit operators from charging online businesses to carry its services.

On Sept. 9 in Paris, Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, met privately with a group of about a dozen mid- and top-level executives from several European mobile operators, who pressed him on whether Google was ready to help pay for the traffic it was creating.

“He was extremely complimentary to the operators who were there, but basically he ducked the question,” said one executive who attended the event. “The message seemed to be: you build the networks and we’ll make the profit.”

Syria Internet law threatens online freedom

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Jan Smith

By Roueida Mabardi | AFP |  November 4, 2010

DAMASCUS — Syria is preparing to vote on an Internet law that has raised concerns about online media in a country which already keeps a tight control of the Web and where access to at least 240 sites is blocked.

Journalists say the law, which was approved by the government last week and is awaiting parliament’s rubber stamp, could seriously curtail the online media that has enjoyed greater freedom than print.

During the past few years, dozens of news websites have emerged in Syria, and the Internet has become an important source of information given the state’s close scrutiny of more traditional media.

Reports on sensitive subjects like a ban in Syrian universities of the niqab, or full-face veil, which received wide coverage on the Internet, are often absent from newspapers.

And even though the Internet is often slow in Syria and websites get shut down for specified periods of time, there is no existing law that regulates online activity.

The new law was “very severe,” said Ayman Abdel Nour, director of the website all4syria.org, which is edited from Dubai but has numerous contributors in Syria.

It would allow police to enter editorial offices to arrest journalists and seize their computers, Abdel Nour told AFP, adding the arrested journalists would then be hauled before criminal courts.

His website publishes information on out-of-bounds subjects including the president and his family, the army and religion. Despite being blocked since 2005, his website gets about 33,000 daily hits thanks to software that allows Syrians to get around censorship.

Nidal Maalouf, who runs the pro-government news website Syria-News.com, said that under the new law, online media would be overseen by the information ministry, which would make it harder to criticise the government.

But Syrian League for the Defence of Human Rights (SLDHR) chief Abdel Karim Rihawi said online censorship is already getting worse.

“More than 240 websites are blocked in Syria and attempts to control the Internet continue,” he said.

In its efforts to stifle online dissent, the government has targeted the websites of Syrian opposition parties like the Muslim Brotherhood, Kurdish minority groups, and human rights organisations.

But other websites considered politically hostile to the government, and even social networking sites Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, are also proscribed, Rihawi said.

Media rights watchdog Reporters Without Borders painted a bleak picture of online media freedom in Syria in a July report, describing it as “one of the more repressive countries” in terms of Internet censorship.

“Many bloggers have been harassed by the authorities since the end of 2008 for contributing to online publications,” RSF said.

The group mentioned the case of Karim Arbaji, a blogger who was arrested by military intelligence officers in July 2007 and held in pre-trial detention before finally being sentenced to three years in jail in September 2009 for “publishing mendacious information liable to weaken the nation?s morale.”

Arbaji was freed in January after representatives of the Christian church in Syria addressed a request to the president, RSF said.

Another blogger, Firas Saad, was imprisoned in April 2008 for writing articles critical of the regime and only released in September, said SLDHR’s Rihawi.

Amazon’s 3G Kindle leaps ‘Great Firewall of China’

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Simon Hua.

AFP |  November 1, 2010

HONG KONG — Amazon’s Kindle 3G e-reader is being snapped up on China’s grey market as it has an extra special advantage for customers — it automatically leaps the so-called “Great Firewall” of state web censorship.

Sites such as Facebook and Twitter, which are blocked by the Beijing authorities, can be accessed without interference by the Kindle’s Internet browsing function, the South China Morning Post reported Monday.

Amazon says it is not able to ship the Kindle to mainland China or offer content in the country, which has the world’s largest Internet community at more than 420 million web users, the Post reported.

But a seller in Beijing told the paper he slipped them into China a few at a time after having them delivered to an address outside the mainland. He has sold 300 in the past month.

AFP found dozens of Kindles available on web auction site Taobao, China’s answer to eBay, with prices ranging from a special offer of 700 yuan (105 dollars) to 5,000 yuan.

Several Chinese bloggers are recommending the device, according to the paper, largely due to the fact it can “scale the wall automatically”.

“I still can’t believe it. I casually tried getting to Twitter, and what a surprise, I got there,” the paper quoted a mainland blogger as saying.

“And then I quickly tried Facebook, and it perfectly presented itself. Am I dreaming? No, I pinched myself and it hurt.”

The 3G Kindle uses global system mobile (GSM) communication technology, which gives WiFi coverage in more than 100 countries, including China. The WiFi-only Kindle would rely on a local Internet connection.

Professor Lawrence Yeung Kwan, of the University of Hong Kong’s electrical and electronic engineering department, told the paper that mainland Internet patrols might have overlooked the gadget.

“Every Kindle device is pre-registered to a personal account, so every user’s information is clear,” he said.

“In addition, Kindle has a book-buying focus, so the censors may think these connections are relatively safe.”

The Kindle has its own network, called Amazon Whispernet, to provide wireless coverage via AT&T’s 3G data network in the US and partner networks in the rest of the world.

A 3G wireless coverage map on Amazon’s website includes numerous Chinese cities, suggesting its 3G link involves a Chinese carrier, the paper said.

YouTube faces new ban in Turkey

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | codenamecueball

Associated Press | November 2, 2010

ANKARA, Turkey – Turkey’s telecommunications authority will again block access to YouTube unless the video-sharing site removes a sex video of a former opposition party leader, the state-run news agency reported Tuesday.

The threat of a new ban comes just three days after Turkey had ended a more than two-year ban on YouTube.

The Anatolia news agency said a court, considering a complaint by lawyers representing former opposition party leader Deniz Baykal, ruled that YouTube must be blocked and notified the telecommunications authority of its decision on Tuesday.

Telecommunications officials would now either ask YouTube to remove the video or block access to the site, the agency said.

Scott Rubin, a spokesman for Google, which owns YouTube, had no immediate comment on the possibility of a renewed ban, saying he had no information “beyond what I have also read or heard anecdotally.”

Access to YouTube had been blocked in Turkey since May 2008 because of videos deemed insulting to the country’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Turkey restored access on Saturday, after the offending videos were removed.

It is a crime in Turkey to insult Ataturk, who founded Turkey in 1923 after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The country has implemented reforms as part of a bid to join the European Union, but still faces questions about its record on free expression.

Turkey began blocking access to websites in 2007, after parliament adopted a law against cyber crime in an effort to curb child porn, prevent the dissemination of terrorist propaganda and stamp out illegal gambling.

More than 6,000 sites have been banned in Turkey according to Engelli Web, a site that monitors blocked pages.

Former opposition leader Baykal resigned in May after the video showing him having an affair with his aide appeared on the Internet.

UK.gov plans net censor service

By Tsering

Flickr Creative Commons | Maurice

By Chris Williams | The Register | October 29, 2010

The minister responsible for internet regulation is planning a new mediation service to encourage ISPs and websites to censor material in response to public complaints.

Ed Vaizey said internet users could use the service to ask for material that is “inaccurate” or infringes their privacy to be removed. It would offer a low cost alternative to court action, he suggested, and be modelled on Nominet’s mediation service for domain disputes.

Vaizey, who is communications minister, revealed the plan yesterday. He said he will soon write to ISPs and major websites including Facebook and Google to discuss the initiative.

He conceded that industry is likely to resist any attempt at greater regulation, but he is keen to set up a system of “redress” for the public.

“I think it is certainly worth government brokering a conversation with the internet industry about setting up a mediation service for consumers who have legitimate concerns either that their privacy has been breached or that information is apperaing online is inaccurate… to discuss whether or not there is any way that access to that information could be removed,” he said.

“I’m sure that a lot of internet companies would say that is almost impossible, but… one does at least want to make an attempt to give consumers some opportunity to have a dialogue with internet companies on this issue.”

Vaizey’s announcement came in a debate called by Tory backbencher Robert Halfon, which focused on Google and in particular controversies surrounding its Street View mapping operation.

The Information Commissioner reopened his investigation into the harvesting of Wi-Fi data this week, but Vaizey said the Met has now decided not to launch a separate criminal investigation.