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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. 
 
------------------------------------- 
Turkish Courts Block Popular Websites 
------------------------------------- 
¶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. 
 
------------------------------- 
At Issue:  Control Over Content 
------------------------------- 
¶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. 
 
ANKARA 00000603  002 OF 003 
 
 
 
¶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. 
-------------------------------------- 
Process Marred by Lack of Transparency 
-------------------------------------- 
¶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. 
 
--------------------------------------------- 
Google Highlights "Absurd" Legal Requirements 
--------------------------------------------- 
¶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" 
 
ANKARA 00000603  003 OF 003 
 
 
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. 
 
------------------------------------------ 
Politicians, Industry Reps Call for Change 
------------------------------------------ 
¶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. 
 
Visit Ankara's Classified Web Site at 
http://www.intelink.sgov.gov/wiki/Portal:Turk ey 
 
WILSON