Journal: Kazakh Web Witchhunt Goes On

Two weeks ago the government of Kazakhstan suspended the registration of domain names that belonged to two prominent independent news websites, citing a rule that says all .kz websites must be physically located within Kazakhstan. Yesterday it came up with a statement (link leads to a news story in Russian) claiming the closures resulted from a routine check and named three other websites that were shut down for the same reason, but within the last four days. A year ago, infamous borat.kz website was stripped of its domain name in a similar manner. Customers of the country's main ISP, state-controlled Kazakhtelecom, are also unable to visit the mirrors of banned websites located outside of .kz domain, although the company and the government say no blocking is taking place. Domain name suspension notices can be seen through WHOIS look-up at the country's NIC website nic.kz (which, ironically, is also hosted abroad). The reasons why people prefer foreign hosters are clear. First, many local service providers do not want to host "political" websites and even if agree to, the website is never safe from interference. Second, 5Gb of storage would cost you about $85 a month.