Turkey Regulates The Internet Out of Existance

litewoheat writes: "According to this article, Turkey is regulating the internet to such an extent that will make operating any sort of web site impractical and operating an ISP dangerous."

Comments

Politics

[Mathness]

I think there is more to this story.

Turkey is caught between EU and the middel East.

EU have been dragging their feets to give Turkey membership, for various reasons (which is a study in itself).

Therefore the Turkish goverment have to make some gestures towards the middel East, in case they are never admitted into EU, otherwise the have no hope to appeal to the middel East either.

Alternatively

[4of12]

One of the big problems, and I agree that it is a big problem, is that "lying news" is not defined anywhere, effectively making all Turkish media providers subject to the whims of any authority that considers their content to fall under such a definition.

A similar vague kind of ambiguous catch-all phrase exists in the PRC.

There, what the Turkish government calls "lying news" is referred to as a "state secret" by the government of the PRC.

I'm presuming that the various ethnic (Kurds) and religious factions comprising Turkey are regarded as unstable and requiring a harsh authoritarian government to remain cohesive [Yugoslavia]. Maybe they're right - that otherwise partisan demagogues would fan the flames of hatred to build their own local power bases.

But, the USA, Russia and the PRC show the world that local politicians can continue to play nationalistic games (with nuclear weapons no less) for decades without blowing each other up. Why not let Turkey have the same chance?