Turkey shut down YouTube on Tuesday, just days after had lifted a ban of more than two years.
By MARC CHAMPION
ISTANBUL—Turkey appeared to shut down YouTube on Tuesday, just days after it had lifted a ban of more than two years on the popular video sharing site.
Turks attempting to directly access YouTube on Tuesday evening again encountered a blank screen with a message informing them that YouTube was blocked as part of a May 2008 court order. That ruling had demanded the company, a unit of Google Inc., should remove various videos considered insulting to the republic's founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, world-wide.
On Saturday the ban was lifted, after a group of self-described "volunteers" working with Turkish authorities succeeded in taking the four offending videos off YouTube.com, using an automated copyright protection system. The move effectively achieved the court order without Google's involvement.
On Monday, however, YouTube said it would restore the videos, describing the copyright claim as invalid. The statement appeared to reject what the volunteers had hoped would be a solution to end a ban that is unpopular within Turkey and damaging to its reputation abroad.
Officials at Turkey's Telecommunications Transmission Directorate could not be reached for comment Tuesday evening. A spokesman for Google also declined to comment. The two sides are due to meet later in the week for talks.
At its root, according to media analysts in Turkey, the copyright plan sought to circumvent rather than resolve the core dispute between Google and the Turkish government, namely that Google was unwilling to set a precedent for other governments by allowing Turkey to force the company to remove material world-wide. YouTube had only blocked direct access to the videos within Turkey. The site remains widely used in Turkey via proxy addresses.
Earlier Tuesday, the directorate, which is responsible for enforcing Turkey's tough Internet laws, upped the stakes in its dispute with Google.
The agency issued a statement warning YouTube that if it did not comply with a recent court ruling that it should remove a video at the heart of a political sex scandal earlier this year, then another order to shut down YouTube would have to be issued, the state news agency Anadolu Ajansi reported.
The video in that case showed Deniz Baykal, the then-leader of the Republican People's Party, Turkey's main opposition party, dressing in a hotel room with a lover. The footage, secretly filmed and released inside Turkey, caused Mr. Baykal to resign. Mr. Baykal was not available to comment Tuesday.
Turkey has shut down thousands of websites since passing a law in 2007 that set out a list of eight infringements that could trigger a ban, and gave courts a blunt weapon—closure of entire websites within Turkey—to enforce compliance. The majority of closures have been for reasons of obscenity, but a number of sites also have been forced to close for insulting Atatürk.
—Ayla Albayrak in Istanbul contributed to this article.
Write to Marc Champion at marc.champion@wsj.com
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