OSCE media freedom representative asks Kazakhstan to withdraw Internet regulation

VIENNA, 31 October 2005 - The OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, Miklos Haraszti, has asked the Government of Kazakhstan to withdraw a newly established regulation on the registration of domain names for websites.

"Implementing this provision would put the allocation of domain names on the World Wide Web in Kazakhstan entirely under government control, which contradicts freedom of expression and free flow principles," Haraszti said.

"Since these provisions have not been used so far, and not even discussed in Parliament, it would make it easy for the Kazakh Government to pull back the regulation without any consequences, and thus comply with media freedom commitments."

A legal review of the new 'Regulations for the Allocation of Domain Space in the Kazakhstan Segment of the Internet,' commissioned by the Representative, found that governmental control over registration and the obligation for websites to be hosted only inside a country's borders opened the way to central filtering, blocking, and fragmentation of this global medium.

On this basis, the Representative came up with the following recommendations:

1. Kazakhstan's web space should be administered by a body that is independent of the Government.

2. Registration of a .kz domain should be a purely technical process and impose no substantive restrictions. Applicants should merely be required to submit their name, contact details and the limited technical data required to register the domain.

3. There should be no requirement that the servers for a .kz domain be located inside Kazakhstan, because on a worldwide structure like the Internet every publisher should be able to choose freely where he wants his content to be hosted.

The domain name system is a distributed database that - similar to a phone book - enables Internet users to find websites easily by just entering a domain name instead of a complicated IP number.