Türkiye is Considering Imposing a Band Restriction Penalty on X!

As you know, the social media law that came into force in recent years imposed certain obligations on platforms and prescribed penalties such as advertising bans and bandwidth throttling in case of non-compliance. X, the world’s most popular microblogging platform, now owned by Elon Musk, is one of these must-haves. He did not fulfill the “having a representative in Turkey” clause.

This issue was reminded to Minister of Transport and Infrastructure Abdulkadir Uraloğlu at the April 23 reception held in the Turkish Grand National Assembly. As a reminder for those who do not know, Turkey first imposed an administrative fine of 10 million TL and then 30 million TL for not appointing a representative to X. advertising ban has been imposed and a period of 3 months was given for the appointment of a representative. It was a matter of curiosity what would happen after the 3-month period expired.

“Still X has not appointed a representative to Turkey.” Minister Uraloğlu spoke on the subject as follows:

“There will also be a need for a legal regulation regarding this. Our negotiations are still continuing. There is an advertising ban in force. Subsequently, band narrowing is on our agenda.”

So what is band narrowing?

The Internet operates by passing data packets back and forth between the user’s device and websites’ servers. You can think of it like a highway. We can call the width of the highway “bandwidth”. You can think of band narrowing as reducing the number of lanes on the highway. In other words, when band narrowing is applied, The data flow of the site becomes slower. Just as cars move slowly when a 4-lane highway narrows to a single lane, the content of the site begins to load slowly as data packages travel back and forth in a more limited bandwidth.

Those who do not remember can read the rules and penalties imposed by the social media law for platforms in our content below.