Since Friday, it’s been impossible to access popular blogging platform Blogger or any *.blogspot.com domain from a Turkish IP address, due to a ban imposed by a court in the south east of Turkey.
Previously it was rumoured that Adnan Oktar, by some considered the leading Muslim advocate for creationism, might have caused the new ban, since he successfully got WordPress and Google Groups banned in the past, as well as evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’ website. However, this rumour was refuted by someone pointing out that Oktar operated in Istanbul courts and the verdict banning Blogger was passed in Diyarbakır, at the other side of Turkey.
Click to enlarge.
It’s now reported that it is not Oktar that got Blogger banned, but Digiturk, a subscription based digital TV platform that owns the rights to the live broadcasting of Turkish football league games. Apparently, Digiturk asked Blogger to take several blogs or blog entries down containing links to pirated transmissions of the live games. Blogger did nothing, Digiturk went to court and under Turkish intellectual property law, they managed to get Blogger banned completely, effectively banning millions of websites that have nothing to do with Turkish football or pirating.
Digiturk’s court cases in the past have managed to block Justin.tv and MyP2P TV for the same reasons.
Turkey’s NATO membership and EU ambitions seem paradoxical to the infringement on the freedom of press and speech of its citizens, residents and visitors by banning sites like Blogger and YouTube. The EU’s making a blacklist of censoring countries and are creating software for people in these countries to use to bypass the censorship (see: Global Online Freedom Act).
Thanks to safak for his tip about Digiturk!
Some useful links to unblock YouTube/Blogger (blogspot)/other blocked pages in Turkey:
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