Turkish Finance Minister Defends Twitter Ban 94
An anonymous reader writes "Turkish Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek has defended his governments ban on Twitter and accused the social networking site of not complying with court orders. Simsek said: 'The Turkish telecommunications watchdog has made a number of statements saying that they have asked Twitter on a number of occasions to remove some content on the back of court orders and Twitter has been refusing to comply. I don’t think any global company, whether it’s a media company, whether it’s an industrial company, it shouldn’t see itself [as being] above the law.'" As a result of the ban, Tor gained over 10,000 new users in Turkey.
It isn't above the law (Score:5, Interesting)
It's based in the US. It's governed by US law, not Turkish law. Italy had a similar opinion and convicted three Google employees in absentia to no effect.
Re:It isn't above the law (Score:2, Interesting)
And that's exactly why the internet should not be governed by one country, and internet should fall under an independent law.
Deja Vu (Again) (Score:5, Interesting)
If Twitter does not comply with Turkish law, it is considered natural, since Twitter is based in the US of A and thus not governed by Turkish law. When BETonSPORTS [wikipedia.org] did not comply with American law, their CEO, David Carruthers [wikipedia.org] was arrested in 2006 when in transit to Costa Rica and the following year, founder Gary Kaplan [wikipedia.org] was arrested in the Dominican Republic and extradited to USA — all this despite BETonSPORTS was based in the UK and thus not governed by American law.
Tsch, tsch!
Tor not that popular (Score:4, Interesting)
Tor added 10,000 users which for a country the size of Turkey is lost in the noise. Meanwhile a commercial competitor, HotSpot Shield [wsj.com] added about quarter of a million Turkish users in just 12 hours. It'd be nice if the Tor guys made a version that relaxed some of the ultra-paranoid things they do and made a single-hop proxying service for users who don't care much about anonymity and just want to evade censorship.