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Turkmenistan’s walled garden How Central Asia’s most autocratic country plans to build its own ‘autonomous Internet’

Source: Mediazona Central Asia

Story by Tatyana Zverintseva from Mediazona Central Asia. Abridged translation by Sam Breazeale.

Turkmenistan is widely acknowledged as the most repressive country in Central Asia and one of the most isolated countries in the world. In 2022, the Turkmen authorities officially revealed a plan that had long been obvious to observers: It hopes to create its own national autonomous Internet, something only North Korea has fully succeeded in doing. The independent outlet Mediazona Central Asia took a close look into how realistic this plan is, what Internet access Turkmenistan’s citizens currently enjoy, and why it was the country’s foreign minister who announced the project. Meduza is publishing an abridged version of the report in English.

The Internet: dangerous but prestigious

Like most of the world, Turkmenistan first got the Internet in the 1990s, though only in trace amounts. By all accounts, the country’s first president, Saparmurat Niyazov, was skeptical of the technology. At the same time, the Internet was widely seen not as a global phenomenon capable of changing the world but as a hobby for computer geeks, and Turkmenistan was no exception.

As a result, Ashgabat didn’t do nearly as much as it could have to partition the Turkmen Internet from the wider global Web. Instead, the authorities focused their efforts on obstructing the emergence of independent Internet service providers to give themselves a monopoly, blocked individual websites that criticized the ruling regime, and occasionally shook their finger at the country’s relatively few Web surfers.

While Niyazov was no fan of the information superhighway, Turkmenistan’s second president, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, who came to power in 2006, briefly flirted with guaranteeing Internet access to the public. In one of his first speeches in 2007, he said, “I believe that the international network [called] the Internet, this newest of communication technologies, should be available to every citizen.” Several Internet cafes opened in Ashgabat soon after, and with that, Berdimuhamedow appears to have considered the job to be done.

In the years that followed, the Turkmen authorities’ relationship with the Internet developed along two contradictory tracks. On the one hand, it became increasingly obvious that the modern world wasn’t just using computer technology but was becoming fused with it; before long, it wouldn’t be possible to do anything without the Internet. At the same time, however, Turkmenistan’s ruling regime wasn’t prepared to share its monopoly on the spread of information.

Turkmenistan is arguably the only post-Soviet country where independent media outlets are not just targeted by the authorities and subjected to censorship but are categorically banned. Legal media reports in the country consist of positive anecdotes about the president, descriptions of official events, and “cultural” stories about traditional dances and carpet weavers; publishing most other kinds of information is strictly punished.

From the beginning of Berdimuhamedow’s rule, reports on the success of Turkmenistan’s “digitalization” efforts appeared regularly in the government-controlled media. At the same time, the authorities didn’t seem to understand fully what the Internet is or what role it plays in the modern world; it’s more likely that they simply considered the development of digital technology to be a marker of prestige.

By all appearances, Turkmenistan’s official narrative about the Internet hasn’t changed since the days of Niyazov’s rule. Schoolchildren are now taught about the dangers of smartphones in the same way they’re warned about smoking and alcohol; the Internet, they’re told, is unequivocally harmful.

Foreign territory

The structure of the Turkmen government is not particularly transparent. Judging by reports from last year, the Internet appears to fall under the purview of the National Security Ministry. At the same time, back in 2019, the government passed a new “cybersecurity” law that prompted the creation of a Cybersecurity Service that answers not to the National Security Ministry but to Türkmenaragatnasyk (“Turkmencommunication”), an agency within the Industry and Communication Ministry.

In February 2021, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov’s son Serdar Berdimuhamedov, who would replace his father as president in the spring of 2022, was appointed deputy prime minister for digitalization. Then, in November 2022, the independent news outlet and human rights organization Turkmen.news obtained a document stamped “For Official Use” that listed the members of a new cybersecurity commission. According to the document, Serdar Berdimuhamedov personally created the body in April 2022, one month after he was named the winner of the country’s presidential election.

The document named Turkmenistan’s national security minister as the commission’s chairman, while its members included the head of the Transport and Communications Ministry, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, the prosecutor general, almost all government ministers, and numerous other officials. Not included, however, were any representatives of the aforementioned Cybersecurity Service.

Most notable was the inclusion of Foreign Minister Raşit Meredow, a veteran and éminence grise of Turkmen politics. In September 2022, two months before Turkmen.news obtained the document outlining the cybersecurity commission, it was Meredow who officially announced at a government meeting that plans were underway in the country to create a “national digital network.” Turkmen.news also obtained the government’s previously secret cybersecurity program for 2022–2025, which describes the plans in more detail.

But this raises a question: Why was a step as major as the creation of an autonomous “internet” announced not by the head of the Industry and Communication Ministry, or even by the National Security Ministry, but by the foreign minister?

The answer lies in the fact that the Turkmen authorities see the Internet not just as a communication technology but as a new kind of “foreign territory.” In their view, the Internet is primarily a tool that foreign countries could use to influence the minds of Turkmen citizens. From that perspective, putting all interaction with the Internet into the hands of the country’s foreign minister makes perfect sense.

The state of the Turkmen Internet

As of 2020, while 80 percent of Turkmenistani citizens had cell phones, only 26 percent used the Internet. Meanwhile, only 2 percent had made online purchases, and just 1 percent had social media accounts. For comparison, 30 percent of people in the world used the Internet in 2010, which means the current level of Internet penetration in Turkmenistan is comparable to the global average more than a decade ago.

Turkmenistan’s connection speeds are stuck in the past as well. Until recently, the country’s only Internet service providers, Turkmentelekom and Ashgabat City Telephone Network, offered plans with speeds ranging from 512 Kbps to 2 Mbps. The companies have been promising since early 2023 to release new plans offering speeds up to 6 Mbps, but after multiple false starts, they still haven’t rolled them out.

Throughout the world, including in Turkmenistan’s Central Asian neighbors, Internet speeds around 100 Mbps are the current norm. Sources who spoke to Turkmen.news noted that at least in Ashgabat, it would be easy for providers to increase speeds to that level with the country’s current infrastructure; there’s no physical barrier preventing such an upgrade. There may, however, be an unofficial ban from the government.

The mobile situation is a bit better. Turkmenistan’s only mobile Internet provider, Altyn Asyr, provides speeds as high as 9–10 Mbps (with the average mobile Internet speed in other countries at about 20–25 Mbps). As of today, however, 4G technology, the modern standard for cell communications, works reliably only in Ashgabat. Altyn Asyr announced plans for a significant expansion of 4G coverage into the country’s regions only in late February 2023.

At the same time, speeds of 2, 6, or even 10 Mbps in 2023 are significantly less useful to consumers than they were in 2003, because modern websites are made to function on modern Internet speeds.

But that’s just the start of the difficulties facing Turkmenistan’s media consumers.

Ashgabat’s censorship began with targeted blocking of sites containing information deemed “harmful” to the ruling regime. Eventually, all independent media outlets, social media sites, almost all messenger apps, and certain content sharing sites such as YouTube were blocked.

After that, many users got used to using VPNs to circumvent the censorship. About two years ago, however, the National Security Ministry and the Cybersecurity Ministry purchased special equipment and hired foreign specialists to help them block IP addresses where active VPNs were detected.

According to estimates from experts, by the end of 2022, 2.5 billion IP addresses were blocked in Turkmenistan, while the total number of IP addresses in the world is approximately four billion. In other words, the number of web pages Turkmen citizens can access without a VPN is getting smaller and smaller, and finding working VPNs is becoming a substantial challenge.

As is often the case, money can help. A bribe of about 1,000–2,000 dollars per month can get an IP address added to a “whitelist,” making it possible to use a working VPN, though many VPNs themselves cost money as well.

Internet use in Turkmenistan is thus becoming a privilege available only to the rich. A number of Turkmenistani businesses, for example, have Instagram accounts, as do the wealthy Ashgabat residents who constitute those businesses’ target audience. Most of these users self-censor; they might discuss their personal lives, but they never even come close to criticizing the authorities.

There are exceptions, of course: some people post videos and write comments on YouTube, while others read independent media outlets and share information with them. But this always carries the risk of prosecution and imprisonment.

Easier said than done

Arguably the only true “national Internet” (rather than a highly censored version of the main Internet, like in China) is North Korea’s Kwangmyong closed intranet service. It was created at the government’s request in 2000. Some of the materials on the Kwangmyong are original propaganda content, while others are taken from the global Internet, carefully inspected by censors, and translated into Korean. Certain Wikipedia articles, for example, have been transferred to the Kwangmyong through this process.

Access to the global Internet in North Korea requires a special pass. As of 2019, about 1,000 of these passes had been granted. Even these privileged users, however, can’t explore the Internet freely from their homes; instead, they’re allowed to visit a designated room in a government building that contains a computer. They’re not allowed to download VPNs or send emails to foreign media agencies, and they’re only granted access when necessary.

The situation in Turkmenistan is significantly different. Because Internet access was initially much less restricted than it is today, a considerable number of citizens managed to learn how to use the Web — and how to circumvent the government’s censorship. And while citizens’ ability to leave Turkmenistan is severely restricted, it’s not completely banned; labor migrants and young people studying in foreign universities, for example, are allowed to leave the country. All of these people have the ability to figure out how the Internet works abroad, and to apply their knowledge when they return home.

For those reasons and more, it’s unlikely that completely shutting off Internet access would be easy for the Turkmen authorities, especially given that doling out VPN access has become a lucrative side hustle for many security officials.

At the moment, Turkmenistan’s ruling regime doesn’t seem capable of building a network on the scale of the Kwangmyong. All of the government’s past attempts to create its own digital products (including a taxi app, a public services site, a messenger app, and a search engine) have quietly died away within months of their release.

Meanwhile, for the vast majority of Turkmenistan’s elite, the Internet remains a toy that’s good for little more than showing off expensive watches on Instagram.