Comments on: Kazakhstan Lacks Sense of Humor

By: oso

oso — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 18:33:39 +0000

The International Herald Tribune had a great piece this morning on the Borat site being shut down. I wish I saw the MTV Europe awards in Lisbon.

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 17:53:29 +0000

As a Central Asian colleague of mine was telling me recently, it is pretty hypocritical of the Kazakhs to get so offended as all the things that characterise Borat is how people there tend to describe the Kyrgyz. If they buy the show, they can just dub it and change the nationality of the character; the same way they turned Fawlty Towers’ Manuel into an Italian when it was bought by Spanish television. That would be the sensible thing to do.

By: Tim Newman

Tim Newman — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 13:19:36 +0000

“But there are no Borats in Kazakhstan!”
“Hurh hurh! Not an more.”

By: KZBlog

KZBlog — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 12:33:45 +0000

I had always wondered if the new laws that sites under .kz had to be located in Kazakhstan was just an attempt to shut Borat.kz down or not. And I agree with your characterization. FOr better or worse, the whole world is much more sympathetic to small funny guy than big sensitive government.

By: Narcogen

Narcogen — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 05:52:18 +0000

The new rules are to allow the government to censor websites inside of Kazakhstan by controlling their domain name servers. Currently all major operators in the country are slaved to the national operator’s DNS system. Eurasia.org.ru, for example, is unviewable inside Kazakhstan without the use of proxies.

Prior to June of this year, it was possible to register a domain name in the .kz TLD thorugh Register.com and host it anywhere. Now, while you can still register the name and host its site anywhere, the DNS servers for that name must be inside Kazakhstan, meaning the government essentially has control over them.

That the Association has chosen (or was instructed) to play I’m-taking-my-ball-and-going-home as a result of something as childish as Borat’s third-rate comedy act is disappointing; however, the real issue here is not that Kazakhstan is just giving Borat more material (which is true). It’s that they’ve now drawn attention internationally to the mechanisms by which they execute their censorship of the Internet in-country, which has largely gone ignored up until now.