Kazakhstan: Major retailer suing over website ban
Authorities say they intervened to stop children from seeing pictures of sex toys online.
Ham-fisted attempts by officials in Kazakhstan to stymie online shoppers’ ability to buy sex dolls have prompted a local company to file suit against the government.
For a two-day period that ended on August 9, the website of Tekhnodom, a large retail chain specializing in electronic goods, was rendered inaccessible as prudish bureaucrats worried young children could see items intended for adults.
“Items of an erotic nature should be sold only in specialized shops, so-called sex shops,” the Information and Communications Ministry said in a statement cited by Forbes news website.
For critics of the authorities, this episode marks just another instance of overreach by a government seeking to strictly vet what people may or may not view on the internet.
Tekhnodom founder Eduard Kim called the government’s behavior unjustified and said it had caused his company $83,000 worth of lost sales daily.
“When you go to a certain section on our site, a warning appears to state this is suitable only for over-18s — and this is even though we are not required to do this, there is no regulation about this on the law books,” Kim said.
The company’s director for business development said around 7 percent of Tekhnodom’s sales are carried out online. Tekhnodom said the arbitrary blockage of websites could damage the prospects for online commerce in Kazakhstan.
Although the Information Ministry was created in 2016 with the express intention of streamlining public access to reliable facts about current events in the country, it has ironically led the charge in restricting information to the public.
Few understand that better than Gulmira Birzhanova, a lawyer who this year filed suit against the ministry after officials there refused to divulge the size of state subsidies to local media outlets. She argued that the temporary ban on Tekhnodom’s website was quite unfounded.
“The list of grounds for preventing access to internet resources is detailed in the law titled ‘On Communications.’ Moreover, access can be restricted in the case of information that has been banned … by a court decision. This case did not meet the requirements for a block,” Birzhanova said in remarks cited by Forbes.
Online restrictions have historically been aimed at resources perceived to be disseminating radical religious ideas. Access to resources run by the political opposition movements and independent media outlets has also frequently been limited.
The campaign to build a firewall to keep out politically undesirable content escalated earlier this year, when a court ruled to designate self-exiled government foe Mukhtar Ablyazov’s Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan movement an extremist organization. Since Ablyazov makes heavy use of websites like YouTube and Facebook and the Telegram messaging app to spread his message, the quality of access to those resources has deteriorated significantly at select times over the past six months.
Sign up for Eurasianet's free weekly newsletter. Support Eurasianet: Help keep our journalism open to all, and influenced by none.