For many countries on the world, there are some restrictions on the Internet. The most popular one is banning YouTube. In Turkey, the story is same. After some offensive contents about Turkish leader, Ataturk, it banned like in other countries.

This blockage could be related with democracy level of countries and freedom of thought and speech. We cannot conclude it in this way but if we look at democracy level index of Economist, a worldwide known popular economy journal, it shows Turkey at 87th place in the world. It means there is a hybrid regime, no fully freedom for society.

Maybe this rank should be more higher but still there is a hybrid regime. I don’t know about politics too much, but I can see the subjectivity in newspapers and TV channels and also on the Internet. If you have enough knowledge, you can create your own conclusions not to be affected by this subjectivity. Otherwise, you will believe what they said and become a dummy player on their game. Since it is not our topic, we should examine the restrictions and their reasons.

As a smart society, Turkish people found new ways to reach those restricted websites: Proxy and VPN services. So where is the point of restrictions?! Government can really be effective on people who want to watch and share videos on the Internet. And, only webpage is not YouTube that you can share something. There are many others. As you see there is no meaning in restriction of YouTube. Since there are websites like ktunnel, vtunnel , etc., restriction is so meaningless.

On the other hand, those restrictions created new business areas. Yes, those are VPN services which can give you freedom on the Internet. Pay small amount of money and get your freedom to surf on the Internet. This another solution if you don’t like advertisements and pop-ups on the proxy websites. And those proxy websites also gain without you paid from advertisements so those restrictions are helpful for those service providers.

To sum up, in Turkey there are some restrictions, you cannot reach every websites without proxy service providers. Also you should pay or cacthed by advertisements for this service. This situation does not provide any sufficient evidence there is a relationship between democracy level and unrestricted usage of Internet but somehow it gives idea about the reasons of restrictions. Like in the main page of YouTube, government can make decisions about which website that you can reach or not.