akost has associated [ru] this “marketing approach” with the one that had been applied back in the Soviet times, when “people were forced to work on subbotniks (area clean-ups), and nowadays people are forced to upload videos to inferior video portals”. bakha has suggested [ru] that the reason for that is that “the authorities have dumped a lot of money into that project and now they are looking for the ways to justify it by administrative increase of traffic”. At the same time, Kimberly jokingly notes [ru] that “fun” is the most popular tag on KazTube.

Against the background of the notorious amendments on Internet regulation and their adoption by the Parliament, one may readily suppose that such approach can become a regular practice in the near future. Kazakhstan may deliberately hinder the development of web 2.0 with its user generated content and replace it with the “approved by the government content”.

Kuanyshbek Yesekeyev, the head of IT and Communications Agency, who initiated these amendments, is worried [ru]:

“Internet has to be regulated to some extent. If it flows naturally, then there is a possibility that the events similar to those in Moldova (when popular uprising was organized via Internet) will take place in Kazakhstan.”

So far no criticism has taken due effect. Roundtables held by rights advocates, letters addressed by journalists and politicians to the Parliament, and even the strong criticism of the OSCE and other international organizations failed to stop adoption of this online censorship law. OSCE Representative for the Freedom of Media Miklos Haraszti has said that this law would become a step backwards and asked president Nazarbayev to veto it.

Is Kazakhstan going to remain the country with positive contemporary history, which voluntary abandoned nuclear weapons and put forward various integration initiatives, or is it going to spoil its image and give a green light to censorship despite protests of local and international community? The Parliament of Kazakhstan has already passed the amendments and submitted them to the president for signing.

Also posted on neweurasia

Dear users,
The department of information technologies at the Governmental Agency on Informatization and Communications is pleased to inform you that we plan to create a National Search System within the framework of KazNet development. The search system will be society-oriented. In this regard, we ask the Internet community to help us in choosing a name for the search engine.

In the below-the-post discussion threads bloggers have been debating not only possible names for the search engine, but rather the overall necessity of the whole innovation.

Thus, Zhomart thinks [ru], that this is “just another way of money laundering”. Valentin doubts the AIC's technical ability to make it good [ru]:

“It's fishy. The best they can do is to create a websites catalog. Actually, what is the reason of making something that already exists? They will not have enough capacity to create something better than the existing search engines. It's going to be some fake at the expense of taxpayers’ money”.

Assasin believes that the agency should solve internal problems first [ru]:

“What are you talking about, a search engine? They cannot even do a dns server properly. Look - aic.gov.kz doesn’t return the page, only http://www.aic.gov.kz works. There was an online conference with Kuanyshbek Esekeev, the AIC chairman on “e-government”. He was not able to respond to concrete questions! A search engine… It would probably take 50 years for them to make one”.

There is a lot of skepticism, and that's quite understandable. What is the need to invent a bicycle? What is the need to create a new search engine (irrespectively of who is helping to do it - Yandex, Google or Microsoft), if the already existing search engines provide correct indexing and perfectly find all Kazakhstani websites. They do not require any additional time or financial investments, especially in harsh times of economic crisis.

Besides, the new resource is being publicly positioned in a quite strange way. In particular, it remains unclear what stands behind the “society-oriented” nature of a search engine. Besides, if the Internet is meant to unite countries and to remove borders, why Kazakhstan needs a localized search engine, however functional it may be? What is it: a self-affirmation complex, a reason to spend the agency's budget or a real technical necessity?

While bloggers are passionately discussing the issue, organizer of the Annual Kazakhstani Internet Award and one of the first and most respected bloggers in KazNet, Alexandr Lyakhov quotes some figures [ru]:

According to the paragraph 8.1.1 of “the Program of fighting Internet inequality in Kazakhstan for 2007-09″ (it is being implemented by AIC), KZT 28,8 million (nearly $242,000) was to be spent in 2007 and 2008 from the budget for the development of an “intellectual search system”.

Blogger Valentin bitterly jokes that it could be cheaper to hire people that would receive requests, google for them and send back results to the users.

But the matter has already gone beyond jokes: several days ago blogger Zhomart published in his blog a draft open letter to Mr. Esekeev, the AIC chairman, describing the problem and demanding to stop the project. He also asks bloggers to sign it and send the letter to Astana.