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The answer to this question is controversial at best. I have made a numerous inquiries to many companies in communications sector as well as the Institute of Information Technologies and Communication  of the Republic of Turkey. There are two scenarios, which may be speculations, to what really lies beneath.

Scenario One: You Tube Incident

The government is trying to stop all possible access from high to low levels to this service. They claim righteousness based on a number of civil court decisions. We all know that no matter what the cause may be, people have the right and should have the power to decide what is good for them, not some institution.

Scenario Two: Google’s Untaxed Income from Turkey

Some of the services provided such as Google Apps Premium Edition and Google AdSense are paid services. While the charges for these services per user are not high (most of which are dependant on the budget of the users), when they sum up Google has revenues in excess of 100 million dollars in the Turkish market. It might not be fair to say “in” Turkish market, but “from.” Since Google uses their own online payment system, this money paid by the customers are mostly unregistered to the finance system of Turkey. The money is going out of the country, untaxed, and the Ministry of Finance is not able to charge any form of tax to Google since the base of operations is not in the borders of Turkey.

But what do the officials say?

The institution has replied to my email saying that they have not blocked any of the services other than the You Tube, and that it is not their responsibility but Google’s for the continuance of their services. They are siting a numerous press releases and court orders supporting their actions.

Evidence to the contrary

For the end users, in the end, it doesn’t really matter what the cause is, but the result; people are obstructed from using these services. It can only be described as, because all would agree with me that there are ways to overcome such obstructions. If one is eager and willing to acquire information, the hands of the authorities are bound, and can only create temporary resolutions. Soon the blogs and websites will be filled with information on how to connect to such services, a couple of which I have mentioned on my previous post.

Conspiracy, English, Poli-Critics, Techno-Critics Google, Google Apps, internet, technology, Türkiye

Well the rumors are official as of yesterday. In the last few days we have been experiencing connection problems accessing some of the services of Google. At first it did not seem persistent but more of an on-and-off issue, but as of yesterday morning the officials finally out did themselves.

The Information Technologies and Communication Institution of the Ministry of Telecommunication and Communication of the Republic of Turkey has published an official statement explaining the latencies and/or unavailabilities of certain sites owned and operated by Google. The ground of their actions is “due to legal reasons.”

This has been done before

In the past YouTube and Google Sites services have also been banned. Despite the bans for these sites on the DNS query level, their new trick is now banning on the Internet Protocol (IP) address, which is a lower level and cannot be easily solved by using external DNS services such as OpenDNS, etc., which most of the Internet users have been accustomed to using.

Now here is the part that sucks; Google does not use static IP addresses to their services, but a pool of them. Since the requests for such domains are handled from this pool of availability, the number of banned services are quite few.

Below you may find the banned and/or lagged services due to this new “lawful action:”

• http://code.google.com
• http://pages.google.com
• http://video.google.com
• http://translate.google.com.tr
• http://docs.google.com
• http://sites.google.com
• http://books.google.com
• http://chrome.google.com
• http://sketchup.google.com
• http://froogle.google.com
• http://labs.google.com
• http://mars.google.com
• http://moon.google.com
• http://notebook.google.com
• http://toolbar.google.com
• http://browsersync.google.com
• http://catalog.google.com
• http://codesearch.google.com
• http://dir.google.com
• http://earth.google.com
• http://groups.google.com.tr
• http://shopping.google.com
• http://sky.google.com
• http://support.google.com
• http://tools.google.com
• http://wap.google.com
• http://answers.google.com
• http://google-analytics.com

Disturbing!

I have switched my company from MS Exchange to Google Apps Premium service about six months ago. This strategic change had significant performance increase for our project development, team collaboration and agility. It seemed like a move in the right direction, until yesterday.

“Like China?”

Upon the statement from the Ministry, I have called the Google call center and reported the issue. The agent’s comment was quite right, but disturbing, “Like China.”

Unlike China, we have democracy. People are not told what they are and can do, but decide for themselves, or so I thought! It is now official, we are run by a dictatorship, censoring all controllable source of information, like China. Most of the services of Google is now contraband!

Wake up! Companies are running these web based applications for their everyday businesses.

In the past, DNS lookup did not work. People have found work arounds as I have mentioned above. This recent action, banning IP addresses will not work either. People will start using other network configurations such as VPN (Virtual Private Network), Proxy servers, SSH (Secure Shell) tunnelling, which are, by the way, already in place by businesses with world-wide operations.

One wonders…

What would they do next, jail the ones that use work arounds for accessing these services?

English, Poli-Critics, Techno-Critics Google, Google Apps, ignorance, internet, technology, Turkey