Turkish Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) that's part of the ruling coalition government is mounting yet another attack on virtual private network services. VPN providers have been a thorn in the hybrid regime's side for years now, directly denying much of its growing appetite for censorship.

Just for added context, this is the same government that banned access to Wikipedia for nearly three years due to a no-nonsense list of its ties. It wasn't until last December that the Turkish Constitutional Court, its top judicial body, ruled the ban is a violation of human rights and promptly had it lifted by mid-January.

While there's a pretty good chance he gets his wish codified, there's no way VPN popularity in Turkey is going anywhere but up moving forward. As countries such as Pakistan, Russia, and China learned long ago, banning VPNs is easy, but keeping them banned is impossible. Two decades into the 21st century, deploying another server farm to replace one some despotic government banned on a DNS level after days - if not weeks - of futile bureaucratic efforts takes seconds and costs pennies.

Projecting blatant incompetence and weakness is every despot's worst nightmare, so this state of affairs also doesn't bode well for the rest of the Internet-censoring bill that's currently making its way through Ankara. That is, given how there's no true solution for banning VPNs in the country, there's no effective method of preventing access to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and every other Western social media platform that the MHP and its partners are currently trying to outlaw in the name of their hybrid regime.


Of course, not every citizen will know how to leverage those to circumvent Turkish state censorship but the younger demographics - you know, those that tend to produce the most dissidents - are far from unfamiliar with VPNs. In part, thanks to the snowballing Streisand effect the ruling nationalists keep feeding into with their legislative failings. More new about technology check out Wild of Tech