Internet in Turkey

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The Internet in Turkey has been available to the public since 1993, although experimentation at Ege University started in 1987. The first available connections were dial-up. Cable Internet has been available since 1998 and ADSL since 2001. Turkey has 70 million active Internet users as of 2022.^[1]

Currently Türk Telekom is the most widely used Internet service in Turkey, offering speeds from 16 Mbit/s to 1000 Mbit/s. Alternative broadband companies, while mostly still using Turk Telekom infrastructure, such as TurkNet is also available meanwhile building their own fibre infrastructure in 5 cities^[2] and offering only 1000 Mbit/s speed. Superonline is offering fibre broadband in 28 cities,^[3] though the company is enlarging at a healthy pace. They currently offer up to 1000 Mbit/s speeds. Furthermore, relatively wide but not universal coverage of cable Internet is maintained by Kablonet, offering speeds from 16 Mbit/s to 1000 Mbit/s.

Türk Telekom's monopoly and perceived excessive pricing have received numerous criticisms from users over the years.

The penetration and the usage of credit cards are very high in Turkey. However development of alternative payment systems will be helpful both by facilitating the shopping of the consumers owning credit cards and by familiarizing non-credit card holders with the e-commerce. In 2019 it was reported that the Internet users of Turkey had reached to 69,107,183 (12th highest number of internet users worldwide)^[4] - amounting to 88% of Turkish households having internet access.^[5] Wi-Fi in Turkey is free in all areas and easily accessible to all the citizens. Hotels, hostel, railway stations, airports have free access to internet and Wi-Fi.

Turkey implements protectionist policies to stimulate the local internet technology industry and enforce data retention: In 2016 payment gateway PayPal was forced to cease most of its operations in the country.^[6]

Internet Entrepreneurship in Turkey, also called "Digital Bosphorus"^[7] has reached several exits in last years. The biggest three of them have been Yemeksepeti,^[8] Gittigidiyor^[9] and Markafoni.^[10] According to Sina Afra, the potential of the Turkish Internet market is bigger than in many other European countries.^[11]

Internet in Turkey holds a 'Not Free' ranking in Freedom House's index.^[12] Turkish government has constantly blocked websites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and as of May 2017, Wikipedia was inaccessible^[13] According to Twitter's transparency report, Turkey leads in social media censorship.^[14] till 15 January 2020; Wikipedia opened to access after the Constitutional Court of Turkey ruled that the block of Wikipedia violated human rights and ordered it to be lifted on 26 December 2019.^[15]

According to the EngelliWeb Report of the Freedom of Expression Association (İfade Özgürlüğü Derneği) entitled Fahrenheit 5651: The Scorching Effect of Censorship,^[16] by the end of 2020, Turkey had blocked access to more than 467.000 websites. 409.000 orders issued by 764 different institutions, including criminal judgeships of peace and other authorized public institutions.^[17]

• Censorship in Turkey
• Internet regulation in Turkey
• List of countries by number of Internet users Turkey, 15th
• Languages used on the Internet
• List of countries by number of broadband Internet subscriptions Turkey, 15th
• List of countries by number of Internet hosts Turkey, 16th
• List of countries by Internet connection speeds Turkey, 63rd & 43rd
• List of countries by IPv4 address allocation Turkey, 24th
• Carna botnet Turkey, 19th
• Web Index Turkey, 38th

• "eCommerce Report". TÜSİAD. Retrieved 9 October 2016.
• "Turkish eCommerce Outlook". Deloitte. Retrieved 9 October 2016.
• Sina Afra. "Observations on eCommerce". Sinaafra.com. Retrieved 9 October 2016.