Kaznet under fire

Translation of the publicist’s post, originally posted on neweurasia.net

How would Kaznet develop after the notorious amendments to the Law on internet are adopted? Yesterday there was the attempt to answer this question taken in MediaNet, the International center of Journalism, where the research on the economic after-effects of the mentioned amendments was carried out by polling over 60 professional web-market players.

According to the majority of the respondents, the prime cost of the internet business in Kazakhstan will increase by over 10%, which would negatively affect its competitiveness. At that, the group of high risk web-projects that can either loose their positions or disappear at all includes Web 2.0 resources, interactive projects with user-generated content (such as: forum, blogs and social networks).

It also became clear that 95% of the internet providers and 98% of website owners, which took part in the poll, had not been asked for the opinion when the amendments to the law were prepared. According to MediaNet the draft of the law meets neither the demands of the local market, nor the international legal standards, and, moreover, it even contradicts the state concept of uniform information space.