Very few people in Turkey are exercised by the YouTube blackout, now in its second year. Despite the ban, the video-sharing site is believed to be the ninth most popular site in Turkey. Almost every Internet user -- from Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the humblest teenage porn connoisseur -- knows how to circumvent it with proxy browsers. "I get in," Erdogan told reporters in November, 2008. "You can do so as well."
But maybe they should be more concerned. Blocking the exchange of information through the Internet is a top priority with some of the world's most oppressive regimes. China is devoting considerable energy to developing technology to block the best Web 2.0 sites, for example. Inexorably, a line is between drawn between countries that restrict their citizens' access to information and those that do not. And which side of that line does Turkey – with its European Union membership aspirations – find itself on?
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