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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

I’m just sad to watch the world following Turkey’s steps on Internet control.

These ISP level “security filters” have been a thing in Turkey since 2011. They are optional but they always try to trick people into enabling them. There’s even safe internet day(5th February), they send you an SMS with a link to instantly enable filters to celebrate internet safety day.

What I find weird though, not all sites are blocked equally. Some are on DNS level and simply using something like Google DNS removes the blocking, others are blocked on IP level and only VPN can help. There’s no consistency between the ISP on site blocking methods.

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I’m sure these services exist in every country. I don’t see the problem if they’re opt-in.

It's a concern for me when they no longer become opt-in to prevent dangerous things like "misinformation" and "terrorism" and most importantly copyrighted material.

I'm not aware of any such services in the Czech Republic, for example, opt-in or not.

Neither in the Netherlands. Some piracy websites (e.g. The Pirate Bay) are blocked by court order (with no opt-out), but definitely not archive.org.

This one is optional. Thousand of pages are blocked with court orders and hundreds of thousands are blocked categorically(porn, copyrights etc).

PayPal, Booking.com and many more are illegal due to data protection or business guild reasons.

Netflix, Prime Video, radios, podcasts etc are subjected to censorship by TV&Radio broadcasting regulator and are required to register for a license.

Social media with user base over certain number are required to be licensed.

The world mostly caught up but there’s still some way to go.

If they exist, we are one moralizing mad government away from opt-in to opt-out to no option.

They pass the initial law as opt-in. That allows them to fund the initial infrastructure.

Then they make it out-out. The change doesn’t get much attention because the funding is already in place and “think of the children”.

Then they add political thought crimes to the filters.

Then they make it so you can’t opt-out.

Seems to me like this is more of a law problem rather than a company problem.

Here we have a telecom service provider law, which states, among other things:

ARTICLE 57. - Network neutrality. Prohibitions. Service Providers shall not:

a) Block, interfere, discriminate, hinder, degrade or restrict the use, sending, reception, offering or access to any content, application, service or protocol except by court order or explicit request of the user.

In this case they are opt-out, so there is a problem.

I'm pretty sure Montenegro doesn't block anything on the internets.

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