My blog is blocked in Turkey. All of it. The whole blog, the whole country.

The reason is that a Turkish creationist petitioned the Turkish court to block access to the entire WordPress.com domain because of what he claimed were libelous posts about him. The court agreed, and I’m therefore blocked. (It seems as though I’m also blocked in China, but that’s a different story.)

Reading the comments and various posts, it appears that the answer may be as simple as using OpenDNS to bypass the government-approved DNS servers, or alternatively, by using Tor, which has other benefits as well. Courts tend to be rather stupid when it comes to technology, which is sometimes a huge hinderance, but in this case serves the people well. OpenDNS is not only not under the Turkish courts’ rule, but it also doesn’t appear to have any plans to censor anything (unless you decide to do this yourself).

So why does this matter? First, the Turkish people are losing their rights to free expression by having sites blocked. We condemn it in China and other totalitarian countries, so we must condemn it in our ally countries as well.

Second — and this is the one that should really get you if you’re an American — the same thing is very close to happening in the United States. After declaring AT&T a monopoly, we’ve allowed constant consolidation to return us to a mammoth AT&T, and this time they’ve shown themselves to be friendly to both censorship and spying. What’s more, even if you don’t mail a check to AT&T, chances are good that you’re still using AT&T’s backbone, which gives a single company nearly limitless control over your access to information.

Things to watch:

1. Turkish Internet censorship, specifically of WordPress.com;
2. Adnan Oktar, a.k.a. Harun Yahya;
3. The U.S. telecommunications industry — or what’s left of it.