In the world of developing countries, invention is a foreign word, and technologies are only acquired from the western countries instead. This becomes hard to swallow for many, but we can live with it. The problem gets bigger when they become selective on what is a useful technology and what is a harmful one. Few years back, the Ministry of Transportation arranged with all ISPs in Kuwait to block porn sites and other sites they find harmful. You can expect how many eligible sites got banned on the way. MetaCafe and YouTube got affected recently, and some Kuwaiti Blogs even were blocked. So it seems we are becoming more and more like China. Now they want to ban the VoIP sites that allows people to make international calls, simply because it’s costing them money! To put it in another way, the new technology will save people 20 million KD that the government prefers to keep to it to itself instead. It’s a pretty shame for the people who spent their time and money to make this VoIP dream a reality.

It is worth mentioning however that while we pay around $650 annual 256 kbps DSL registration fees (in advance), and not very rarely the network is extremely slow and you can do nothing about it, you start having to use a Proxy eventually to by pass what government does not like you to see. The proxy ofcourse becomes the bottlenick here, not to mention other possible browsing issues. The government wants to control and protects its people from harmful content, so they blocked porn sites. However down all shops you can find the pirated uncensored film movies for 3 bucks, and even original ones in major store like Virgin. Original DVDs are available there, and no one is doing anything against it. $55 Showtime TV subscription is also available to show all the uncensored movies, but since it’s a business with money in, no one is doing anything about it. Whenever the money might go out, or there is harm without money in, government wants to take action. One of the other great services not available in Kuwait also is PayPal. I am not sure now whether this is from the ministry or not, but it definitely opens the door for some real nice services like Skype and eBay.
Now, instead of investing in upgrading the ISP networks, giving us more stability and faster bandwidth, they would like to monitor and control our browsing more. For the past 4 weeks I have not had two consecutive days with stable connection. Even though I paid for the media, when it is available in good shape, the government wants to restrict my use of that media. Right now, if you are traveling and someone gives you a ring on your roaming phone, you get charged per minute even if you don’t answer it. So a ring is worth $3 sometimes. I saw a full real big bill of missed calls the customer got charged for just the missed calls. If the government wants people to follow what they call the legal ways, they better try to make it in reasonable prices.

You can find a translation of the news article from Al-Watan Newspaper here. Original source for Arabic readers is here.

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