The Internet in Tajikistan emerged as the country was ending a bloody civil war that followed the demise of Soviet rule in the early 1990s.
Telecommunications remained fragmented up until the end of the 1990s, with several companies failing to interconnect because of fierce (and at times violent and armed) competition.
[1] Since the end of the civil war, the government has taken steps to attract investors and liberalize the sector prompted by expectations of accession to the WTO.
In recent years, the telecommunications sector has boosted Tajikistan's GDP, and the number of licensed Internet and mobile operators has been increasing.
[1] One respected Tajik NGO estimates that 1 percent of households own personal computers and that most people access the Internet from home by way of dial-up connections.
Access with DSL and wireless (Wi-Fi and WiMAX) technologies is limited by relatively high costs, and therefore restricted to a small number of commercial companies.
The ONI data reveal that with the exception of TARENA (an educational network), all Tajik ISPs maintained two international points of access, one located in Russia and the other in Western Europe.
The most active users are university students, employees of international organizations, commercial companies, and public sector institutions.
Among Tajik youth, the most popular applications include instant messenger, followed by social networking sites (odnokassniki.ru, my.mail.ru), and online educational resources.
The president remains the key authority that ratifies the main legal documents in the IT sector and directs ICT policy in the country.
The lower chamber (Majlisi Namoyandagon) and the president ratified the Law on Changes and Amendments to the Criminal Code in June and July 2007, respectively.
In 2006, the government signaled its intention to create an agency under the auspices of the Ministry of Transport and Communications that would control the ISP sector.
All telecoms and ISPs were required to provide direct access to the state inspectorate in a manner similar to Russian surveillance legislation (SORM).
In 2009, the high cost of the project as well as lobbying from telecom operators halted its realization.32 ONI Testing Results Tajikistan does not have an official policy on Internet filtering.
However, state authorities have been known to restrict access to some Web sites at politically sensitive times by communicating their "recommendations" to all top-level ISPs—an example of second-generation controls.
"29 As a result, several oppositional news Web sites hosted in Russia or Tajikistan were inaccessible to Tajik users for several days.30 Although officials offered unclear reasons for shutting down the Web sites, independent media sources believe that the block list will grow in the future.31 In 2007 and 2008, the OpenNet Initiative tested in Tajikistan on four key ISPs: Babilon-T, Eastera, Tajiktelecom, and TARENA.
This article was originally adapted from the December 1, 2010 OpenNet Initiative profile of Tajikistan, which was published under a Creative Commons Attribution license.