This is a farewell to our freedom of speech, privacy and World Wide Web, and an unwanted welcome to Turkey Narrow Web.
Ahmet A. SabancıDear Internet,
We, as people from Turkey, had a great time with you. You teach us so many things that we couldn’t learn from anywhere else. We had lots of great memories with you. You were always there whenever we needed you. But we have to say goodbye.
Turkish parliament passed the bill which is going to kill you. Maybe it’ll not kill you directly but you’ll be crippled and we can’t do everything we want together. There’s a little chance for you -presidential veto- but like I said, it’s a little chance.
I know you’re not ready for this but I have to tell you what will happen after tonight. I know hearing this will hurt you but you have to get ready for these. Because these seems inevitable.
- We won’t be able to talk everything. TİB (Turkish Telecommunications Directorate) will have to power censor everything they didn’t like. That means government can censor everything. They won’t be needing for a court decision.
- Talking about “harmful” contents with you will be counted as a crime. If we’ll talk about something “harmful” or host these “harmful” content, I’ll be a criminal.
- ISP’s going to log everything we do together. They’ll keep these logs for years and government can check these logs whenever they want.
- They’ll use URL-based censorship on you. That means, if my essays on Medium counted as “harmful”, other people can see Medium but they’ll never be able to read my essays on Medium. And most of the people won’t be able to notice this.
- They’ll use DPI. That means they’ll see what we’re doing, whenever they want. We won’t be able to do anything in secret.
There are lots of more, but you probably get the point.
Please don’t think like we’re giving up on you. We’ll fight and do anything we can to get you back. We won’t give up so easily.
But this is what’s happening right now. They’ve passed the bills without thinking about the consequences. They don’t care about you or us. They’re acting like you’re just another media type that must be controlled. Because for them, you’re just a menace, some ugly technology.
They don’t know anything about you, just like they don’t know anything about us.
Sadly, this is a goodbye. Both to our freedom of speech, privacy and basically the internet as we know. We hope it’ll be a short one.
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