14 DAY TRIAL // Some countries are giving out free Internet, others are making it a legal right. But Turkey has its sights set on even higher goals, providing all of its 70 million citizens with an email address and creating its very own search engine to replace the untrustworthy Googles and Bings of the world. The head of Turkey’s communications watchdog said that the project was well underway and that the search engine should be going live as soon as 2010.
The motivation behind the grand project comes from the security concerns of relying on a service operated in a foreign country. Tayfun Acarer, chairman of Turkey's Information Technologies and Communication Board, wants to eliminate this risk and dependency by building a home-grown search engine. "All internet communication data goes to foreign countries and then it returns. This activity has a security aspect," Acarer said.
Furthermore, most popular search engines today don't offer much support for Arabic languages, Acarer claims, making it hard for many people to use them. "I believe that our search engine will be popular in Turkic countries and Muslim countries and I am confident that these countries will trust our search engine," he added. He obviously hasn't heard of ImHalal, to name one.
Along with the search engine announcement, he also revealed that the country was working on making email universal for its citizens in a project dubbed the Anaposta. "Under this project, all of our 70 million citizens will be given an e-mail address with a quota of 10 gigabytes. Every child will have an e-mail address written on his/her identity card since birth. So, will have a mobile network that can be used thanks to id number match and foreign networks, such as Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail, will not be used anymore," he explained.
There are obvious strategic advantages to localizing the infrastructure especially with basic services like search and email. You could argue that today's services are too intertwined and dependent on each other that no one country could really control the Internet, but Turkey seems to be saying 'better safe than sorry'. Of course, having these basic and immensely popular services in your control could come in real handy if you're trying to make sure that the citizens don't access something they shouldn't and say things you don't really approve of. After all, YouTube has been banned in the country for over two years now. [via World Bulletin]