Turkey at the Edge

From Berkman Center Executive Director John Palfrey...

The people of Turkey are facing a stark choice: will they continue to have a mostly free and open Internet, or will they join the two dozen states around the world that filter the content that their citizens see?

Over the past two days, I’ve been here in Turkey to talk about our new book (written by the whole OpenNet Initiative team), called Access Denied. The book describes the growth of Internet filtering around the world, from only about 2 states in 2002 to more than 2 dozen in 2007. I’ve been welcomed by many serious, smart people in Ankara and Istanbul, Turkey, who are grappling with this issue, and to whom I’ve handed over a copy of the new book — the first copies I’ve had my hands on.

This question for Turkey runs deep, it seems. They are on the knife’s edge, between one world and another, just as Istanbul sits, on the Bosporus, at the juncture between East and West. The majority of those states that filter the net extensively lie to its east and south; its neighbors in Europe filter much more selectively (Nazi paraphenalia Germany and France, e.g., and child pornography in northern Europe). We’ll learn a lot from how things turn out here in the months to come.

An open Internet brings with it many wonderful things: access to knowledge, more voices telling more stories from more places, new avenues for free expression and association, global connections between cultures, and massive gains in productivity and innovation. The web 2.0 era, with more people using participatory media, brings with it yet more of these positive things.

Widespread use of the Internet also gives rise to challenging content along with its democratic and economic gains. As Turkey looks ahead toward the day when they join the European Union once and for all, one of the many policy questions on the national agenda is whether and how to filter the Internet...

- continued -