1. YouTube.com

1. Google.com.qa

• TOP 5 BLOGS IN QATAR

Guide to Qatar Blogs
1. Qatar Living| Everything you need to know about living in Qatar
2. Qatar Visitor - Travel Guide to Doha and Qatar

Individual Blogs
3. Mr Q. A Qatari's View
4. Marjorie in Qatar
5. Radius QATAR

Ranking by Technorati

• QATAR LIVING

60% of users come from Qatar



Founded in 2005, Qatar Living is the first social network in Qatar. People world-wide come here first to decide if Qatar is the right place for them. QatarLiving.com is indispensable in the lives of Qatari’s and those looking to move to Qatar. It is the ultimate Qatari one-stop information portal and makes the lives of everyone in Qatar a lot easier.

Qatar Living also started a Qatar Blogs Project to gather bloggers living and/or writing about Qatar in one place. However, some of the blogs linked there have been inactive for a long time.
According to a 2009 report by the OpenNetInitiative, Qatar recognized Internet’s usefulness at an early stage, giving the country the second-highest penetration rate (34 %) of the Arab region. Qatar is nevertheless one of those countries, the government of which wants to protect their citizens from all kinds of evil material that’s out there stalking them in the dark alleys of the Internet. However, as is the case with other similar totalitarian regimes, the government reserves the right to determine the nature of such material.


Filtered material and objectives

Evil material, as perceived by the main regulatory authority ictQATAR (Qatar Supreme Council of Communications and Information Technology) primarily includes pornography, political criticism of Gulf leaders and anti-islamic sites. Also sexual health issues, such as information about contraception and HIV, as well as dating and escort services are obviously considered to have harmful effects on the public wellbeing. The objectives of Qatari internet filtering are to “maintain ethical standards” and to “protect the culture of the society.

Filtering methods

The state-owned internet service providers (ISPs) are also said to restrict and spy people’s online communication activities, such as e-mail and chatrooms, with the help of a proxy server. According to a report by Reporters Without Borders, Qatar Telecom (Qtel) has the means to spy messages sent through the other internet service providers. Social content and Internet tools (for circumvention of filtering) are pervasively filtered.

Well - at least they are honest about what they do, since filtering is considered to be straightforward and transparent: instead of the usual error message, a user wishing to indulge him/herself in forbidden material, is shown a block page.

The filtering scheme does have its peculiarities, though: blocked sites are said to be accessible for businesses, but not for households. Also internet cafés are able to bypass the filtering system. In other words, the citizens are actually allowed to access web pornography and anti-islam websites, as long as they don’t do it in the comfort of their own homes…

Laws and future directions

As the story with internet filtering usually goes, also Qatar has had its share of accusations of blocking non-obscene or non-offensive websites. However, ictQATAR says it doesn’t directly define which websites the service provider Qtel should block, but says that Qtel works directly according to the laws, using it’s own judgement.

The new Telecommunications law from 2006 defines abuse of any telecommunications network to be punishable and to carry a maximum penalty of 1 year’s imprisonment.

However, Qatar has allegedly become a more liberal country during the reign of Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani. This development may well continue in the future, possibly making Qatar’s filtering less stringent. For example, VoIP (Skype) calls were previously forbidden, but were proliferated as of July 2008.