Belarus may or may not have banned browsing foreign websites, but no-one appears to be asking Belarus
Gnh. First day of work in 2012 and already I’m getting angry by online reporting. Various sites report citizens of Belarus are now banned from visiting foreign websites, referring to an article published last Friday by the US Library of Congress. The thing is, no-one appears to be asking Belarus. And some comments on the aforelinked articles are interesting:
On The Next Web, ufoby writes:
The article is not quite correct. Yes, the internet is regulated and yes it’s bad. But the regulations don’t have any list of banned websites. At least not yet. So you still can access anything. What regulated now is local businesses that can’t have websites hosted outside Belarus, should only use .by domain name and have a complicated offline procedure of registration. Access is also regulated, but in a different way it’s described here. You can only access internet with the passport. That’s it. It means to install it home you should be registered at a service provider with a passport. To use it in internet cafe you should show passport. Restaurants, cafes and other public spaces are also obligated to ask the passport from anyone who tries to use Wi-Fi.
And on TorrentFreak, Sandra de Palma writes:
I think the law is mis-interpreted by all the blogs and news sites that picked this story up. It says that as a business owner with a web site, your site has to be hosted in the country and that it has to have a .by domain name.
Normal web site users can still access Google, Wikipedia and other web content which is not located in the country.
At the time of writing, BBC tech reporter Dave Lee is on Twitter providing a different take to the existing online reports:
Foreign Office tells me Belarus law does not apply to individuals seeking foreign websites, unlike every blog in the universe is reporting. [link]
Although it’s not a ban on foreign internet, Belarus web law does prohibit visiting the websites of opposition groups. [link]
From what I can tell from this mess, things don’t look great for web use in Belarus, much in the same way they don’t look great in the USA when you take into account SOPA. However, today’s reporting has been sensationalist, with publications more or less cloning existing reports verbatim, without checking alternative sources, not least those in Belarus. Perhaps the reports will turn out to be accurate in the short- or long-term, but it won’t be through investigation—it’ll be through luck, having relied on a single source that may or may not be accurate.
The death of paid journalism is also the death of fact checking. Online ‘reporting’ often seems to be done using three keys only, one of which is ‘Ctrl’…
Thing is, this kind of stuff gets picked up everywhere and quite often finds its way into printed newspapers a few days down the line. Some of them are little or no better.
Still, at least a couple of sites have bothered to look into this now, albeit far too late.