Always ready to offend people who like that sort of thing
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Belarus bans access to foreign web sites
THE GOVERNMENT of the landlocked country Belarus has just decreed that its citizens must not access foreign web sites and has made such activity a misdemeanour offence.
The law comes into force this week and scores highly on The INQUIRER's admittedly industrial strength shock meter. Despite our heads and bodies telling us that we have recently endured a New Years Eve party, we did have to check that it was not April 1st.
"The newly published Law imposes restrictions on visiting and/or using foreign websites by Belarusian citizens and residents. Under this new Law, the violation of these rules is recognized as a misdemeanor and is punished by fines of varied amounts, up to the equivalent of US$125," says a notice published by the US Library of Congress in recognition of this rather baffling decision.
"The Law requires that all companies and individuals who are registered as entrepreneurs in Belarus use only domestic Internet domains for providing online services, conducting sales, or exchanging email messages."
The US Library of Congress notes that this heavy handed behaviour will mean that citizens of Belarus will not even be able to do things like shop at Amazon, unless that firm has a genuine presence in the country, and citizens and web cafe owners will be in trouble if they let anyone use their machines to look at any web site that ends with a .co.uk or .com top level domain name, for example.
The law also provides that ISPs and web cafe owners will have to hand over information about any guilty parties' web browsing, and will face closure of their businesses if Belarus tax collectors or secret police decide that such behaviour is endemic. µ
Tags: Internet
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Ahem, please overthown your government. It should be easy seeing how stupid they are.
This is all to push their domestic internet. Specifically if 90-95% of current supposedly domestic internet sites are not domestic. This is true even for larger countries like Russia.
Hahaha.....even own russian women/bride sites are mostly not russian why probably they smell like a bordello or hidden pr0n places.
Maybe you understand it better than I, but it seems to me to mean that as a hypothetical Belarusti I would have to set my business e-mail and web site address to, say, lugosi.bela. (These are probably not the right conjugations.) I could still shop at amazon.com but possibly could not sell goods through amazon.com, unless Amazon incorporates in Belarus, possibly.
"The Law requires that all companies and individuals who are registered as entrepreneurs in Belarus use only domestic Internet domains for providing online services, conducting sales, or exchanging email messages."
If you're not an "entrepreneur", which I think means "licensed trader", I don't see where you're touched by this.
"The newly published Law imposes restrictions on visiting and/or using foreign websites by Belarusian citizens and residents." Yes, but "restrictions" doesn't mean "absolute prohibition".
Has the US Library of Congress cocked up massively?
... the governing party responsible for this wins the elections again, i have two words for any Belarusian reading this: vote rigging.
Belarus's actually being a great deal more lenient than the USA's SOPA bill. But then, Belarus is a lot more democratic than the USA these days.
in Romania decades ago. The person responsible ended up against the wall, on Christmas Day 1989. Saddam and Gaddafi tried it too, and it also ended badly.
Hopefully the leaders of Belarus will try something different soon.