The Turkish Parliament passed the Draft Law Amending the Law Regulating Broadcasting in the Internet and Fighting against Crimes Committed through Internet Broadcasting (the “Amending Internet Law”) on February 5th, 2014. The Amending Law will be applicable following the approval of the President of the Republic, Abdullah Gul. Given the fact that Gul was a member of the current ruling party and rarely uses his veto power, he is expected to approve the below changes, despite the significant opposition from society.

It has been a while that Turkey has been ruled by a political party leader (head of the so called “Justice and Development Party”, Tayyip Erdogan) as opposed to a government, a crucial component to any accountable democratic regime. Since the majority of the members of the parliament, the Chairman of the Parliament, majority of parliamentary commissions’ members, and all members of the government are members of the same political party; Erdogan dominates all legislative and executive roles. According to his comments on leaked recordings, which show he has directly called journalists to interfere in the broadcast to censure the opposition party leader on TV, he believes that this is his duty as Prime Minister.

It is important to note, Turkey has a constitution that consists of the principles of democracy, which cannot be applied as it has been revealed that the majority of decision makers are apparently corrupt.

The Amending Internet Law contains provisions that enable government authorities to demand any information from content, hosting and access providers and have made blocking access to a website unbelievably easy. However, most importantly, I would like to point your attention to a specific provision of the Amending Law that may be the cause of the ultimate death of Internet in Turkey.

According to the provision on blocking access to content due to the right to privacy; any person may apply to the Telecommunications Authority (the “TA”) for blocking access to the relevant content, in the event that their rights to privacy are violated. Once the TA receives a request in this respect, it shall immediately transmit the request to the ISPs, and accordingly the ISPs shall block the access within 4 hours. The content will be blocked forever, unless the court decides there has been no violation of privacy within 72 hours of the first application or the hosting provider removes the content.

Such a provision is shocking for several reasons.

First, since the TA shall immediately transmit the request to ISPs and the ISPs shall perform the blocking, the request will not be examined by any party before blocking the access. As a result, anybody can block access for 72 hours to any URL by simply filling a web form.

Second, such a provision is open to be abused by the government, considering the latest blocking access decisions of Vimeo and Soundcloud, which are blocked due to the user generated content that implicates the Prime Minister in alleged corruption related to villas at the west coast of Turkey; and there might be no judge to say such content does not constitute violation of right to privacy in exchange of losing his/her job.

Without a doubt, this provision will have a negative impact on content based web businesses, but more significantly it will abolish the individual’s right to access information, which the Erdogan government is willing to do after the Gezi Park protests and above mentioned corruption investigations.