Turkish Court Orders YouTube Closure Days After Service Resumed
Nov. 2 (Bloomberg) -- A Turkish court ordered that access to Google Inc.’s YouTube website be blocked again, days after the site was reopened following a 30-month ban.
The court in Ankara ordered the closure because the site posted videos showing former opposition leader Deniz Baykal, the state-owned Anatolia news agency reported. Baykal quit as leader of the Republican People’s Party in May after a video on the internet showed him in a bedroom with a female lawmaker.
The court instructed Turkey’s telecommunications regulator to ask YouTube to remove the video, and block access to the site if it failed to comply, Anatolia said. YouTube was still accessible from Turkey as of 9 p.m. local time today.
Turkey in the past week relaxed a ban on YouTube that had been imposed in May 2008 after videos on the site were deemed by courts to have insulted the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, which is a crime in the country.
YouTube reposted the videos that led to that ban to make them accessible from outside Turkey, after deciding that they didn’t violate its copyright policies, Ozlem Oz, a spokeswoman for Google in Turkey, said yesterday.
Turkish visitors to the YouTube site have been able to circumvent the ban by using so-called proxy websites.
Las Vegas-based Gabriel Ramuglia, 27, manager of hundreds of proxy sites, told Istanbul-based Hurriyet Daily News that YouTube-specific traffic from Turkey, which made up a substantial portion of his revenue, had dropped by half in three days following the lifting of the ban. The newspaper didn’t give specifics of the decline in revenue.
More than 4,000 other websites remain banned in Turkey, Hurriyet reported.
By Benjamin Harvey and Steve Bryant
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