Turkey is urged to amend its Internet regulation in view of YouTube bans

Turkey was reproached by free press organization Reporters Without Borders on Tuesday. As it is known YouTube, Google's video-sharing site has been banned in Turkey for two years already. Most of the time the service was blocked due to videos deemed insulting the country's founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The last, fourth time YouTube was banned in the country for the same reason. The service was blocked on 5 May 2008 because of the clip believed to have originally sparked the YouTube controversy in 2007 and which was a parody news broadcast by Greek football fans taunting their Turkish rivals by declaring, "Kemal Ataturk was gay!"

Although there is a Turkish law that lets prosecutors seek a court-ordered shutdown of any website deemed liable to incite attacking the memory of the republic's founding father, some criticized the law saying that just a couple soccer fans can effectively shut down an entire country's access to the world's most popular video-sharing website.

After that particular video was taken down by Google and YouTube users, Turkish prosecutors objected many other videos which are allegedly insulting Ataturk or other Turkish sensibilities, and the latest news was on three Ankara magistrate court orders on the grounds that Google hadn't obtained a license from the Turkish authorities.

“The blocking of YouTube has gone on long enough,” Reporters Without Borders said today in a prepared statement. “We urge the Turkish authorities to amend their legislation regulating Internet use instead of than arbitrarily censoring content. Such behaviour is unworthy of a country that claims to be democratic and makes us very concerned for the future of the Internet in Turkey. We call for the revision of the three court orders that led to this unwarranted blocking.”