Turkey Becomes First Nation To block Google DNS, Claims Twitter Is Groveling At Its Feet

Turkey Becomes First Nation To block Google DNS, Claims Twitter Is Groveling At Its Feet

Turkey’s corrupt Prime Minister Racep Tayyip Erdoğan has upped the ante in his quest to “root out Twitter,” which is hugely popular in that country. Three days ago, Erdoğan banned Twitter in Turkey after links purportedly showing him ordering his sons to destroy evidence during a police investigation of corruption were shared through the microblogging site. Turkish citizens propmtly bypassed the ban by using Google DNS instead of local Turkish DNS servers — so the government has responded by banning Google DNS.

Erdoğan has come under heavy fire over the past year for violent crackdowns in Taksim Gezi Park after citizens rallied to halt him from destroying some of the last green space in Istanbul. Seven people were killed and more than 8,500 injured in the protests; Erdoğan has been at war with his own populace ever since. Heavily implicated in multiple corruption schemes, his decision to shut down Twitter in the wake of substantiated allegations is a desperate attempt to cling to power.

The web interprets censorship as damage and routes around it

Health Minister Mehmet Müezzinoğlu claims that these moves have brought Twitter to its knees, writing: “Twitter has knelt down [before the Turkish government]. [We are a] nation in love with its independence. And [enhancing] this is what Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has done. We are no banana republic.” Other members of Erdoğan’s cabinet have claimed that blocking Twitter is a way to maintain peace during upcoming elections.

Blocking Google DNS, however, is a major escalation. Not only is it arguably illegal, it’s going to encourage millions of determined Turkish citizens to find further ways of bypassing these roadblocks. Turkey has based its legal argument for blocking Twitter on a court ruling on Friday that gave it permission to block Internet access to a single Twitteraccount. When twitter refused to remove or delete the account, Erdoğan opted to shut down the site and then move to blocking Google DNS on top of it.

Meanwhile, Turkey’s President, Abdullah Gü, has himself spoken out against the ban. Meanwhile, with Google DNS disabled, there’s an entire suite of alternative DNS providers. If this continues, it could jeopardize Turkey’s application for membership within the European Union. Turkey has also upped the ante by disabling the ability to access Twitter’s IP address over any DNS server, which has promptly driven users to sign up for VPNs and the Tor anonymizing network.

It’s not that web censorship can’t work — China’s Great Firewall is proof that internet censorship can absolutely work, and work beautifully, if applied slowly, relatively subtlety, and over the long term. Shape people’s expectations in general, and you shape their perceptions of what is and isn’t acceptable behavior.

But blatant, heavy-handed censorship of the kind Erdoğan has deployed almost neverworks. Faced with a corrupt government desperately attempting to cover its own tracks, the citizenry is responding with multiple creative attempts to break the government’s hold on information.