The censorship of popular websites in Ethiopia

Brief Introduction
As stated on my post http://ethiopillar.blogspot.com/2009_08_01_archive.html, Internet is becoming the major source of information communication worldwide. The rulling party in Ethiopia is saying that the national election will be conducted as scheduled on year 2010 but at the same time it is kept blocked a numbers of websites that are focused on ethioian issue and they are credible among the informed peoples. This post try to comment on these very important issues.

Internet in every aspect of human activities

Since long time ago the Internet has become a mainstream as information tool. It is now becoming a common practice to find key information online, on free and democratic countries most find the information they seek and many now search the Internet first before making a important decision.

As per http://ecmweb.com/news/electric_importance_internet_2/ the Intenet was the valuable means of communication in Manhattan when desk and cell phone had failed after the World Trade Center (WTC) attacks on 9/11..

Now Internet contains many facilities in single devices called “Computer with Internet”. it is known taht People are using their computer to communicate with friends and families trough Skype, Messenegers, Facebook, Paltalk, and Tweeter. Though Internet you can get TV, Radio, phone, calendar, Cities guide .... to conduct on line purchase, to find a store or search out a best product to make the purchase decision before they get to the location so that they are saving time, fuel cost, getting comppetitive market and price on a specific product ….. etc it is impossible to list all application of Internet now a day. There are numbers of people The internet is becoming parat of modern where they could no longer live without it.

In ethiopia, it is not a secret that we have no Internet coverage in most of our small cities and the existing websites are not at international service standard. In many places and most users still uses the dial-up slow connection. Being so, we are not sub estimating the importance of the Internet to Ethiopians when it is concerned to information communication. Therefore, the above personalized use of Internet can me translated to Ethiopians too at established tecnology level. The Internet creates global communities that compute in global economy where it is hard to identify given information as useless or very useful.

Top website ranking

Recentily while I was writhing my blog I riced a quesition to my self which blog site is most popular among ethiopian readers. My search conduced me to the web page http://www.alexa.com/topsites/category where tried to see the top ranked sites in each category. A partial view of this page is given here at left side after clicking on the Global tab to list top web site at world wide level. The list of result shown helped me to check the credibility of the information on this page as per the Alexa traffic rank. Observe the 9 top list are Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, YouTube, Windows Live, Wikipedia, Blogger.com, Microsoft Network (MSN) and Baidu.com

Case 1: list of top web site for users located in any country and with Traffic Rank between 1 and 10 000 000

On this page, I filled “ETHIOPIA” on the text box called “Find sites about…”, I selected the option user located in any country and clicked on Go command button. As result, I listed bellow the tope 9 web sites among 821 sites found.
Embassy of Ethiopia ethiopianembassy.org
Cyber Ethiopia cyberethiopia.com
tourismethiopia.org tourismethiopia.org
Ethiopia mfa.gov.et Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ethiopia.
nazret.com
Ethiopian Airlines ethiopianairlines.com
MediaEthiopia ethiopians.com
Ethiopian Review ethiopianreview.com
Globe7 globe7.com
allAfrica.com

Case 2: list of top web site for users located in United State and with Traffic Rank between 1 and 10 000 000 and I worked out like case 1. As result, I listed bellow the tope 10 site among 137 sites found about ETHIO

Ethiopian Review ethiopianreview.com
allAfrica.com
Crawler crawler.com
U.S. Embassies and Consulates usembassy.gov
japan-whores.com japan-whores.com
Ethiopian Reporter ethiopianreporter.com
Embassy of Ethiopia ethiopianembassy.org
Cyber Ethiopia cyberethiopia.com
nazret.com
MediaEthiopia

Case 3: list of top web site for users located in Ethiopa and with Traffic Rank between 1 and 10 000 000. and I worked out like case 1. As result, I listed bellow the all 9 sites found about ETHIOPIA for user located in Ethiopia.
1 Ethiopian Airlines
2 Ethiopian Reporter
3 Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation
4 google.com
5 Jimma University
6 ethionet.et
7 ezega.com
8 ethiojobs.net
9 ethiojobs.com

Example of blocked most popular sites

Comparing the three lists, notice that the top 9 web site list with users in Ethiopia and with users in any country or in USA are different. For example, the following most popular Ethiopian focused web site in USA and Europe are not available for the users in located in Ethiopia
1 Ethiopian Review
2 allAfrica.com
3 Cyber Ethiopia
4 nazret.com
5 MediaEthiopia

If you observe the contents of these blocked sites you can understand that they are basically news, blogs and Internet journals that are directly related with Ethiopian life and concerns. Hence, the objective of the government on blocking these Ethiopian focused websites should be hiding content that are critical for the government like economical, social, political … national electoral crime. It is a way to no provide credible information regarding current issue in Ethiopia, On what ever instrument of evaluation the censorship of these web sites are clear indication of the violation Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Conculsion

As indicated in this blog, a numbers of popular web sites like Ethiopian Review, allAfrica.com, Cyber Ethiopia, naziret.com and MediaEthiopia are not accessible to ethiopians located in our natal countries. This is clear indication of the violation of basic human right that establish “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom of ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”. Therefore if the up coming election is planned to make it free and fair the free flow of information shall be recosidered by the governiment and open the blocked websites.

References
http://www.alexa.com/topsites/category
http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/ http://ecmweb.com/news/electric_importance_internet_2/