A new Internet law has come into effect in Belastan that has essentially banned one of the main news and commentary sites in Belarus, Charter97.org and other sites. That's how to understand it.
And the Washington Post reports it that way.
For some reason, Deutsche Welle, the German radio station that broadcasts alternative information to the former Soviet Union, doesn't.
"Businesses selling goods online to consumers in Belarus will face a number of new regulations effective January 6, but contrary to media reports, Belarus has no plans to ban access to foreign websites," says DW.
For some odd reason TechPresident gets in on the act, although I don't think they ever reported on Belarus in their lives: "this is not equivalent to a shutdown of the "foreign Internet", as some commenters have said, the strong restrictions can clearly ending up in giving great control to the government of Belarus in managing access to it."
Why is the KGB's propaganda travelling along certain well-worn routes?
Charter 97, which has suffered many DDOS attacks and hacks and troubles is still up, but it could be a mirror site or the law hasn't been enforced yet.
Law or no law, Belastan interferes with the Internet all the time; and more importantly, it jails people. Founder and coordinator of Charter 97, Andrei Sannikov, who opposed Lukashenka in the elections in December 2010, has spent the last year in jail, tortured and continually denied visits with lawyers and family and shunted around to different prisons.
I'm troubled by the conclusion that Cyrus Favivar is coming to, with the help of experts he has chosen, saying that this isn't really about censorship, but revenue-collection. Just a tax issue folks, move along, nothing to see here.
Of course, any news site with ads, even if it doesn't sell products, could be viewed as "commercial" in Belarus, even if it only covered costs.
But...I'm not getting why there is this huge effort to impugn the original post of Library of Congress writer Peter Roudik.
There already essentially existed a firewall of Belastan precisely because of the enormous number of attacks on websites and arrests of web reporters.
More to the point, it's very odd that the critics of Roudik aren't addressing his central point:
The Law requires that all companies and individuals who are registered as entrepreneurs in Belarus use only domestic Internet domains for providing online services, conducting sales, or exchanging email messages. It appears that business requests from Belarus cannot be served over the Internet if the service provider is using online services located outside of the country.
How anyone could read that and conclude that there isn't censorship of foreign Internet sites is beyond me.
Many of the opposition sites are registered with domain registration companies abroad.
They don't register within Belarus because they'd likely be denied -- domain registration is controlled by the state. Duh!
I await more information on this debate because there's something wrong with this picture.
