Over the past days, millions of Twitter users in Turkey found themselves in the middle of a Kafkaesque courtroom drama that involved a ban on the microblogging website that, frankly speaking, had little effect in practice:

Hours within the ban, a record number of tweets were sent from the country while a number of high-profile figures including President Abdullah Gül and Cabinet Speaker Bülent Arınç as well as various opposition figures made it clear that it was optional for citizens to abide by this controversial decision.

Internet freedom has been at the heart of a heated public debate over the past months as the Turkish Parliament adopted amendments to the main piece of legislation (Law 5651) to broaden the mandate of the Telecommunications Authority while seemingly ensuring that restrictions would apply to individual URLs as opposed to entire websites - the loophole in the original 2007 law was discovered as public prosecutors and Kemalist plaintiffs joined forces to impose a three-year ban on YouTube. Having received harsh criticism for approving the recent amendments, Gül correctly remarked on Sunday that the Telecommunications Authority has acted in violation of the law by imposing a wholesale ban on Twitter.

Another interesting response to the Twitter ban came from Samsun, where an unnamed female plaintiff sued Twitter for not shutting down a fake account under her name allegedly publishing nude pictures of other women. On Friday, Adnan Aydın - her legal counsel - said that his client did not demand a wholesale ban but merely asked the relevant content be removed.

Meanwhile, another local lawyer challenged the ruling citing his constitutional right to access and share information.

Clearly, it did not help the Turkish government's efforts to highlight the judicial aspect of the affair that the prime minister spoke at a campaign event on Thursday and said in his own way - that there were several court decisions available to warrant a ban on Twitter. Ever since the ban, however, statements from various high-ranking members of the administration and the Telecommunications Authority indicated that the ban resulted from a prolonged tugof- war between Twitter representatives and the Turkish state that involved negotiations about amending Turkey's Internet laws, establishing a Twitter office on Turkish soil and ensuring the company's adherence to court decisions.

To be sure, the recent Twitter ban marks but a minor obstacle in Turkey's overall direction toward an information society:

Across the nation, the government and private initiatives promote computer literacy among the population while children enjoy greater access to technology. An inevitable consequence of such progress is that an increasingly larger portion of the population, countryside conservatives and Kemalist hardliners alike, find themselves exposed to competing worldviews and in a better position to contextualize themselves within the world. The ruling AK Party's vast investments in social media campaigns alone would attest to this nationwide trend.
In light of the above, the overall sense is that the Telecommunications Authority will reconsider its earlier decision and lift the ban within a few days. But the longterm lesson that legislators must learn from this situation is that Turkey will need to put mechanisms in place to discourage similar restrictions in the future and reduce them to a last resort and not the rule.