Software Business in the Middle East

When I came to Dubai in the beginning of 2006, there was only one telecommunication company here – Etisalat. They banned a lot of web sites on the Internet. It was enough to get banned even if a web site had a banner with a naked girl. They banned not only xxx sites, but also everything that’s not consistent with the religion.

The ban policy also had a business reason – Skype was banned too, until they released the later version of the software that had no way to be banned.

Somewhere by the end of 2006 they launched a new telecommunication company – du. After the launch it happened that we moved to the area where du was the only alternative to get Internet from. Everything was super, no bans, all just fine.

I mean everything worked fine until a few day ago when I got SMS and then e-mail from du customer support that ”dear friend, we think about your moral sentiments so we go ahead and ban all the sites you don’t want to visit”. Fy fan.

UAE Community Blog has a small test about what is banned and what is not. Playboy is banned, of course. Article about Fitna is banned on English Wikipedia – but it is available in Swedish, Russian and many other languages. Even Arabic, if I understand it right.

du has also banned some blogs I used to read – despite the fact these blogs have no ”bad” content, just probably “bad” domain name like fuckingbusiness.com. I get this nice page instead. Vivat Google Reader.

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