Who Controls the Internet?
Illusions of a Borderless World
Oxford University Press, USA
February 24, 2006

The France vs. Yahoo case is the opening story of their book which, in its entirety, was an eye opener for me. Namely, there is (and has been) tremendous forces acting towards superimposing national borders over the Net traffic. These stem from political and commercial interests, as well as from ordinary people’s need for law and order, and the governments’ tendency to be the sole/ultimate dispenser of such in their respective countries.

In my opinion, fight for freedom on the Net is handicapped from the beginning if the above factors are blatantly ignored (this could have been said in the past tense really). The Goldsmith-Wu book provides a chronicle of how several powerful advocates of Internet freedoms were eventually defeated… In this light, it appears to me, the approach should be one of limiting the damage, especially when it comes to legislation in trailing countries such as Turkey. I don’t know, maybe, analogies that would resonate with the existing political/legislative mindset could be invoked to stall further negative developments.

For instance, nobody would suggest, as the first thing, cutting of Lufthansa’s access to Turkish airports or passengers just because Lufthansa is the carrier of choice for some criminal individuals. On the flipside, of course, Lufthansa’s such access is subject to complex contracts with Turkish authorities, and they would presumably act upon lawful Turkish requests per these contracts and without much fuss. If this Lufthansa-Turkey example sounds fictitious, consider post-9/11 international air travel to the States, which can be summed up as “You don’t implement my security measures? Don’t bother letting any plane take off towards American soil.”

Of course, I am not at all suggesting that a civil defamation case, and a questionable one at that, is comparable to 9/11 or criminality in general. But, to me, these help show the conflicting interests of the governments and the ordinary people at large, let alone the fact that many an ordinary, law-abiding person might agree with his government, probably more often than not.

A bit more on the shortcomings of Law No. 5651.

– In relation to foreign providers, it doesn’t reflect good world citizenship on Turkey’s part. We know many Internet/web innovations start out a good-faith basis, e.g., WordPress. They should be deserving of similar treatment in return. I.e., the Law could stipulate direct engagement with them to resolve issues before enabling action against them. To wit, I think, Matt’s response would have been totally different had he received an authentic notification from a court, instead of ambiguous or threatening attorney letters.

– In relation to its quick descent towards holding hosts and carriers responsible for preventive action against their users… Could it not have set a threshold of first requiring other, ordinary law enforcement efforts to be exhausted? Even in regards to child porn and the like… There is a big fear campaign about this in the States, too. Yet I am not aware of any good-faith service provider being shut down for it. There is a lot of plain-clothes cyber-policing and resulting arrests though.

“When I invented the Web, I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going end in the USA.
[...]
Control of information is hugely powerful. In the US, the threat is that companies control what I can access for commercial reasons. (In China, control is by the government for political reasons.)”

Source: http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/144

Again the context is the situation in the US, but the danger is seen in changing the nature of the net to bring about more control of the traffic — precisely what would need to be done for our new law to be truly effective. I suppose Sir Timothy could add Turkey alongside China and cite fear of porn, illicit sex and gambling among our reasons.

I’d also recommend the piece by Tim Wu on China which touches on some of things we talked about here:

http://www.slate.com/id/2122270/

And, finally, here’s a recent article in Turkish from the net (with lots of references to newspapers) which might provide a sense of the intense fear campaign centered on child and adult porn:

http://www.derindusunce.org/2007/08/30/tehlikenin-farkinda-misiniz/

Merhaba AKPWatch,

I’m flattered you are paying attention to my WordPress (WP) blog, and all of the posts I’ve filed since this absurd ban began. But I have to disagree on one single point. And that is: I DID NOT WRITE “that CNN Blog is also [a]ffected by the recent block of WordPress by AK Party connected Islamist/Creationist cult leader Adnan Oktar (a.k.a Harun Yahya).” I wrote that the CNN Political Ticker Blog and Flickr Blog are also blocked because of the same court order (decision no.: 2007/195) enacted by Adnan Oktar. The point here is that I never wrote that Adnan Oktar IS CONNECTED TO the AK Party. Any connection is tenuous at best. That’s your view of it. I have no evidence that could prove that and wouldn’t write it unless I had. Maybe you have and should publish it.

On that score, your story about Gaziantep deputy Ahmet Uzer is interesting. I heard something about that. Though I hadn’t heard about the decision to put the (dreadful) “Atlas of Creation” into public libraries (why bother, it’s handed out for free on the street anyway!). If it is the case, as a “citizen journalism” tip, provide a link to a reputable news source if it was in one of the Turkish newspapers. Even if it’s in Turkish, the Turkish audience (affected by this ban in particular) could check that it is substantiated.

But please guys, don’t quote me out of context!

Re: “Jim, can you clarify your comment moderation mechanism (if any)? Even if you don’t have any, WordPress may have some in place.”

As far as I can tell, I think it basically works around the premise on whether you’re a first time commenter… i.e., it seems that, more or less, you and Bulent are getting automatic approval ‘coz I approved you on the first time (fine by me). I get an email notification that you’re comment is on my WP blog. But I think there’s something in the hyperlinks idea. For example, Bulent’s comment that he thought was caught in spam was merely awaiting moderation. So those auto-approved comments prob. didn’t have any links (I think!). Likewise, I’ve posted comments elsewhere (on WP) with links that then say “awaiting moderation.” So I’m guessing that’s the case. Stuff that gets caught in the de-spam mechanism is full of similar looking URLs in it and is definitely spam. For example, I keep getting spammed by sites selling upmarket car parts. Need any car parts?

I am not as knowledgeable as you are, clearly.

I haven’t dealt with stuff professionally for a while so take what I say with a grain of salt.

It may not be cheap and easy, but how about effectiveness for casual users?

I think you can make it as almost effective as any tight corporate firewall/filter if you are willing to spend the money. It’ll be equally broken in many ways too. That is, http/web traffic would work, do the ’surgical’ filtering and log the offending accesses; many of the known services like IM etc. would work at varying levels of functionality depending on what they care to filter (p2p ought to be censorable too, if they want to get rid of porn). Any new/unkown service not working like the known ones will likely not work. This last point is important because if the net had been like that in 1990 we wouldn’t have the web, it had been like that in 1995 we wouldn’t have instant messaging, VOIP, P2P and so on. The net, as we know it, is not designed to facilitate tight control of the kinds of things done with it. I don’t think people understand what a blessing that has been and how much progress it aided.

Anyway, I am not saying they would do things this tightly, but just that if what they do is to be meaningful they’d need to. I’m sure (as the article indicates) there are people in Ankara who claim/think all this can be done easily, from a central location, under their control and without undue bother to the users, but I don’t know what they know and whether they know things I don’t. Someone tought monkeying with DNS was a good/workable idea too and it ended up preventing access to CNN and Flickr simply because they made (technically perfectly OK) use of a DNS feature.

Bulent, FYI, my background is technical, but re: these IT questions, I am not as knowledgeable as you are, clearly. Hence I sometime assume things cheap, easy, and effective. It may not be cheap and easy, but how about effectiveness for casual users?