TURKEY BLOCKS "YOUTUBE" AND OTHER POPULAR WEBSITES

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 ANKARA 000603

SIPDIS

SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: DECL: 04/01/2018
TAGS: PGOV PHUM PREL OSCE TU
SUBJECT: TURKEY BLOCKS "YOUTUBE" AND OTHER POPULAR WEBSITES

REF: A. ANKARA 306

B. ANKARA 151

Classified By: Political Counselor Janice G. Weiner, reasons 1.4 (b),(d
)


1. (C) Summary and Comment: As Turkey's recent ban of the
YouTube video sharing site entered its 13th day, a frustrated
senior official at Google, YouTube's owner, told us Google
would decide within three to six months whether to abandon
operations in Turkey. Google contends that Turkey's current
system of Internet regulation lacks transparency and is
filled with "absurd" and unique legal requirements, such as
allowing Turkish authorities to regulate companies'
databases, effectively permitting Turkey to regulate their
Internet content worldwide. Turkish Telecommunications
Authority (TTA) officials respond that Turkey's 2006 Internet
Law 5651 requires they implement the contested measures.
Several telecommunications officials and politicians
acknowledge Law 5651 was sloppily written, ill-thought out,
and rushed through Parliament to respond to child pornography
concerns. They are calling for review of the law as well as
urgent basic Internet training for judicial officers. With
parliament and the GOT distracted by the closure case filed
against the ruling party, swift action on this issue is not
likely. If Google pulls out, it will hurt Turkey's ability
to attract foreign investment, particularly in the
high-technology sector targeted in the GOT's action plan.
End summary and comment.

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Turkish Courts Block Popular Websites
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2. (U) Three Ankara courts ordered bans of the popular
YouTube video portal March 12 and March 13, after prosecutors
alleged posted videos violated a 1951 law prohibiting public
insults of Turkey's founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Google
officials told us the videos were juvenile productions; one
featured a twenty-something saying "fuck Turkey" in front of
a Turkish flag approximately 100 times. TTA immediately
enforced the ban. Users attempting to access the site
receive notices the site was blocked by court order. When
Google learned the address, or uniform resource locator
(URL),of the allegedly offensive site several days later, it
immediately removed the video and banned the user. However,
the Ankara prosecutor refused to lift the ban until a
court-appointed expert verified YouTube had removed the video
from its data servers. The ban was lifted on March 28.


3. (U) Previous bans remain in place. The January 24 court
order blocking "Slide Inc." for content insulting Ataturk
continues. Slide, with approximately 150 million users
worldwide, is a San Francisco-based privately-owned company
offering a popular online program to create picture slide
shows aimed at users of social networks such as Facebook and
MySpace. An August 17 ban on wordpress.com -- a site hosting
hundreds of thousands of blogs and popular among Americans in
Turkey -- continues, even though only a handful contained
allegedly defamatory content. Sporadic bans continue to
block innocuous content ranging from CNN political blogs to
CNN finance sites.

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At Issue: Control Over Content
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4. (U) At a March 25 conference of Turkish Internet
regulatory officials, politicians and international
observers, Google's European Policy Manager Patricia Moll
explained that YouTube has no quarrel with Turkey's laws.
Users can follow a simple system of "flagging" a video they
believe violates a law or cultural sensitivities. YouTube's
worldwide teams then review and, if necessary, remove the
page, normally within two hours. This system is the only
realistic way to monitor the more than 65,000 videos uploaded
daily, Moll said. For the system to function effectively,
YouTube needs to be informed, via a system such as flagging,
of the URL of the offending video. Moll said TTA
authorities, as well as most Turkish courts, are unwilling to
provide Google with the relevant URLs. YouTube on its own
must search for the alleged offender in its million-video
haystack. YouTube often fails, leading the TTA to block the
entire YouTube site.

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5. (U) Internet Law 5651's requirement that all Internet
services legally register with the TTA is at the heart of the
problem (ref A). TTA continues to withhold URL information
from Google because Google refuses to register. In a
roundtable discussion following Moll's presentation, TTA
President Fehti Simsek explained that Law 5651 gives his
office no discretion to make exceptions. He maintained the
TTA must be able to monitor content because "freedom ends
when one person's freedom impinges on another's." The TTA
has extended the registration deadline April 24 to July 24.
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Process Marred by Lack of Transparency
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6. (U) Google's local counsel explained that Google receives
no notice each time YouTube is blocked. The prosecutors who
initiate the cases and the courts that consider the ban
request possess the URLs in question. She must track down
which court issued the blocking order, then trek to
courthouses across Turkey to try to obtain the allegedly
illegal URL. If she finds a receptive court, she may get the
URL quickly.


7. (U) John Duncan, Slide's general counsel, told reporters
the company received no formal notice of the ban, but learned
from Turkish users in early February that some Slide services
were not functioning. As the ban continued, it expanded to
cover most applications on Slide's site and inside Facebook,
where Slide is the most popular independent provider of
applications. Duncan said Slide's policy is to comply with
judicial rulings requiring removal of offensive or illegal
content. In this case, the company could not learn what
items had provoked the ban. Slide has hired local counsel in
Turkey to try to resolve the issue with the judicial system.

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Google Highlights "Absurd" Legal Requirements
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8. (C) Moll told us privately the Ankara prosecutor is not
familiar with Internet technology and only recently learned
users can easily circumvent bans by using proxy servers. (A
March 27 article in "Taraf" newspaper explains to readers one
simple method.) He since initiated a new requirement:
Google must remove the offending video from its data servers
-- a step that effectively makes it inaccessible worldwide.
Moll said Google would only institute such a drastic measure
if a video contains dangerous or violent content. These
"juvenile" videos about Ataturk may be illegal in Turkey but
do not rise to that level, according to Moll.


9. (C) Moll told us the prosecutor also asked Google to
provide the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the users who
posted the videos. She explained that Google's policy is not
to comply with such court orders if Google believes the court
order is politically motivated. Here, she believes the
prosecutors are under political pressure to hold individuals
legally accountable, and fears turning over the IP
information would put the individual users at risk. Google
therefore could not comply with this request, she said.


10. (C) Moll lambasted the TTA's attempt to enforce its
unique registration requirement that, in Google's view, is an
extraterritorial application of Turkish law. Google is bound
only by U.S. law because it has no legal presence in Turkey
-- it is a California company that hosts all of its data
there. Under such reasoning, Turkey would could monitor and
regulate any site Turkish users worldwide can view, even
though the company has no physical or legal presence in
Turkey. Moll believes TTA officials do not understand the
concept of extraterritoriality. "They see Google employs a
country representative and that Turks are accessing YouTube,
and then conclude that they have the legal right to access
our content." She noted that no other multinational --
Microsoft, Vodafone, Yahoo! -- has registered. In her view,
the GOT believes if it gets Google, with 80% market share in
Turkey, to sign up, others will follow. Moll maintained
Google would abandon Turkey before complying with this
"absurd" requirement.


11. (C) Google will decide within three to six months whether
to continue to operate YouTube in Turkey, according to Moll.
She claims to have lost all trust in Turkey's "politicized"

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courts and contends neither the ruling Justice and
Development Party (AKP) nor state institutions genuinely
believe in freedom of expression; otherwise they long ago
would have abolished Turkish Penal Code Article 301
(criminalizing insulting "Turkishness") and ended the common
practice of suing for defamation over ordinary political
cartoons. Moll said she convinced Google to push economic
arguments and resist the call by several senior officers to
completely close shop (YouTube and Google) and launch a PR
campaign portraying Turkey as a backward "censorship regime."
In the coming weeks, Google will try to persuade Turkish
officials their current policy will have a several
detrimental impact on foreign direct investment. If the GOT
does not reverse course, Google's chief counsel will make one
last attempt before pulling the plug on YouTube in Turkey.

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Politicians, Industry Reps Call for Change
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12. (U) Opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) MP Osman
Coskunoglu commented at the March 25 conference that Internet
Law 5651 was a sloppily-written law rushed through Parliament
in spring 2007 to respond to a wave of reports about child
pornography. AKP MPs Reha Denemec and Cuneyt Yuksel agreed.
Coskunoglu said the law created a confusing set of
overlapping jurisdictions and duties that has caused
inter-agency miscommunication and led to confusion in
companies such as Google. The enforcement regime also had
inadvertently led Turkish youths to create offensive videos
simply to garner front page headlines and cause shut-downs of
major websites. Coskunoglu called for an urgent review of
the law, and an immediate civil society effort to educate
prosecutors and judges on basic Internet concepts that might
help bring some consistency to judicial rulings.


13. (U) Yusuf Ata Ariak, Chairman of the Turkish Competitive
Telecommunication Operators Association, argued that the
confusion is causing Google and other companies to expend
considerable resources tracking down information that TTA
could easily provide. Continuing the current process is
untenable and will lead companies to leave Turkey, he
predicted. The system is also distracting prosecutors and
judges from truly important issues such as violent crime.
Ariak recommended the various agencies dealing with the issue
work together cooperatively to apply the law with Internet
companies such as YouTube. Courts should be called on to
intervene only as a last resort, he said.


14. (SBU) European Commission officers told us privately they
believe Internet censorship is quickly becoming an area of
high concern for the EU. They realize the Turkish judiciary
is not equipped to handle Internet regulation, and plan to
explore the possibility of funding judicial training
programs. AKP MP Denemec and his staff followed up with TTA
officials and continue to monitor the situation, including
discussions by Justice Ministry and Transportation Ministry
officials regarding instituting Internet training programs
for the judiciary and the possibility of revising the
Internet Law.

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WILSON