Regulator orders article critical of Dubai to be unblocked online

Tom Gara

• Last Updated: May 22. 2009 12:06AM UAE / May 21. 2009 8:06PM GMT

The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) yesterday ordered du to unblock a page on a British newspaper website that contains an article critical of Dubai.

The story, “The Dark Side of Dubai”, was published by London’s Independent newspaper in April, attracting considerable attention and discussion in the UAE and abroad.

But yesterday, customers of du, which has a monopoly on broadband internet services in some areas of Dubai, said they were unable to access the story online, with a message from du saying it was in violation of the UAE’s internet filtering policy.

“The website is blocked in accordance as per the TRA’s instructions,” a du spokesman said in an e-mail to The National.

“Decisions to block any site are taken solely by the TRA and we cannot comment on the reasons.”

Hours later, the du spokesman said the company had “received explicit instructions from the TRA to unblock this website”, adding that “any site that is blocked under the TRA’s instructions cannot be unblocked without specific instructions”.

A TRA spokeswoman said the regulator did not issue instructions to block particular websites, and leaves implementation of TRA policy on web filtering up to the country’s two internet providers. The other internet provider is Etisalat.

The spokeswoman confirmed that the authority had asked du to unblock the site.

The UAE’s internet access management policy, released in 2008, outlines 13 categories of content that must be filtered by internet providers.

The categories include content involving pornography, gambling, criminal activities and defamation of religion, but none touches subjects of politics or social criticism. Regardless, some websites featuring such criticism remain blocked.

The UAE is one of 14 countries that has “substantial” internet censorship at the government level, according to the Open Net Initiative (ONI), a US-based group that researches internet filtering around the world.

Along with Saudi Arabia, the group considers the UAE to have the broadest filtering regime in the world, as judged by the scope of content targeted for blocking.

The social networking site, Twitter, was unblocked last August. Thousands of users have since joined the site.

Last October, internet providers admitted that one of the country’s most popular blogs, Mujarad Ensan (Just a Man), was blocked incorrectly, after the author wrote a post suggesting that the UAE’s economy was not immune to a global crisis. The site has since been unblocked.

Also unblocked was the website of the Gulf Times, an English-language newspaper from Kuwait that shares its name with an unrelated US-based publication that was the intended target of the blocking.



tgara@thenational.ae