I refer to this image (below) in my essay, “Service Providers as ICT Infrastructure: Turkey’s Cybercafé Operators,” coming out in Signal Traffic: Critical Studies in Media Infrastructure (Eds. Parks and Starosielski, University of Illinois press, 2015), and provide a link to this page in my endnotes.

background on Turkish internet politics

Under the rationale of protecting of public safety, the Turkish government has blocked over 9,000 websites to date; yet because powerful stakeholders in military, judicial, religious and private sectors influence banning decisions, websites expressing alternative viewpoints are often conflated with security threats. An infamous case occurred in 2007, when an Istanbul court used newly established Internet Law No. 5651 to suspend YouTube for hosting web-videos portraying Kemal Mustafa Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic, as a homosexual.[1]