No Skype, No Foreign Websites – Georgian Opposition Getting Ready To Protest

Interesting news from Georgia today: as one of the largest internet service providers (it controls 60% of the total market) has been experiencing technical difficulties since yesterday evening. These technical difficulties resulted in the fact that everything the users can do is use email (at terribly slow speed) and use some local sites.

This basically means that internet users in Georgia are now left without virtually any online means to reach anything outside of Georgia. It definitely looks like quite a strange situation as people in Tbilisi, the capital of the country, can’t access any sites other than those located in the Georgian .ge domain zone and can’t use Skype either.

It definitely looks like a strange coincidence that at these very moments today the opposition in Tbilisi is going to hold a very large-scale protest with up to 150 thousand people representing various political parties planning to take part in the rallies. The goal is a pretty usual one: they demand the president Saakashvili (the one everyone has probably seen chewing his tie) to resign and they promise the rallies will last until this actually happens.

So absence of internet connection does not really look like a simple coincidence to me and to many reporters here in Russia so people suspect that this is yet another case of authorities in Georgia blocking access to websites that are not welcome at any given moment like it was back in August during the military conflict with Russia when Georgian authorities blocked access to Russian sites to prevent people from reading news in the way they are served in Russian sources of information.

Unfortunately for them I don’t think that leaving people without internet access will help the authorities avoid the unavoidable and will prevent the opposition from having their say anyway. Skype or no Skype, people are tweeting about the events in Tbilisi already.

Via (in Russian)