Why is Turkish government messing with Internet?

Turkish Prime Minister: Facebook Is ?Ugly Technology?

1. Because it is an unruly environment. PM Erdoğan’s intense media bashing along with more practical sanctions gave way to an AKP hegemony over the mainstream media. All major anti-AKP newspapers, TV channels, media conglomerations in general are more or less silenced at the moment. You can just check the media freedom reports on Turkey’s increasing hostility against media people. In the mean time, Turkish netizens had their relative autonomy. AKP government and PM Erdoğan is not loved figure among active web users. You can easily find out more than enough government criticism in major web sites and forums. So it is time to move in to shape web community. In this sense Turkey is not creating its model but following the Chinese model in which as long as your big business relations are all right you can live with less democracy…

2. With the new filtering regime that is to start on August 22, Turkish government is aiming to regulate web usage centrally. Turkey’s web censorship is already embarrasing but decentralized and vague. Now, our elders will decide from the center what we can access. In doing so, in containing web usage in 4 packets (standard, family, children and domestic packets), censorship is also rendered relatively invisible.

3. With the new filtering system, the government moves to criminalize large sectors of netizens. Authorities in charge, who are never definite, vague and mostly now very knowledgeable about cyberculture, declared that attempts to subvert the filtering system will be deemed illegal. (A lawyer friend of mine told me that it is practically impossible to take all people to court with the existing legal system but i assume the government will be more selective about that no doubt opponents will be priority…)

4. This is thus a small but vital part of a larger social engineering project, the current government is into. PM Erdoğan’s recent statements demonstrate a hostility against universal artistic standards (against ancients materials, sculptures etc),  shaping the youth practices (a person at age 18 can but a licenced gun but cannot attend a festival sponsored by an alcoholic beverages company before 24), increasing police brutality, increasing violence against women, not decreasing but increasing level of bureacratisation in many fields- although these are mostly efficient, state employments means a tool for the government-, shaping the cadres in higher education, increasing imprisonment of opponent figures, nationalists and arrogant rhetoric against the EU process…

5. This all leads to not an “Islamic regime” but a patriarchal regime. Erdoğan’s AKP recreates the state as father and holy as in the old days. Current regime becomes a reincarnation of old center-right regimes with a more Islamic colorings…