The .tr domain name system has gone back 30 years!

"Decades" is a term that Turks do not use very often. If you are wondering why the word "decades" is not used much in Turkish, I suggest you read until the end.

It was decades ago when Turkey was developing its internet telecommunications from copper cables; we chose ADSL instead of fiber. Back then, instead of Informatics Councils, there were Informatics Organizations. Very large organizations run by the private sector. I remember very well that I explained at a roundtable meeting that we needed to switch to fiber. Unfortunately, we chose ADSL. Now we are experiencing problems due to the lack of fiber. I will explain why this happened….

It is the year 2024; I was at the Informatics Council, and I thought we would be discussing the future of artificial intelligence in Turkey. Participants are saying 'I want this, I want that'… We leave saying the Presidency will announce the decision in November… November is over, and we are in the middle of December. Has it been announced? No! Why? At the end of the article.

The 2010s…. We formed a Cyber Security Initiative and submitted cyber security reports to the BTK (Information and Communication Technologies Authority). For this community, which was supposed to be a sub-group of the BTK, we ran from meeting to meeting in Istanbul, first preparing websites and then reports. We submitted them to the BTK, and then they disbanded the initiative. Now our HGS (Fast Pass System) information is circulating from hand to hand. Is it just our HGS information? Every day, news comes that the data of another institution has fallen onto the dark web. Why is this happening? The answer is at the end of the article.

Regarding domain names, I wrote a full two-page article in ad.net magazine in the 90s. My headline was "METU is making a mistake again." I wrote that the whole world applies the "first come, first serve" method in domain name distribution. When the domain name system at METU was last attacked, I explained the system's flaws on various radio and TV channels and gave statements to newspapers regardless of their political views. Recently, I had conveyed with calculations that this document-based system of METU made it difficult to acquire domain names, hindered clustering, prevented the proliferation of .tr domain names, and even caused a current account deficit for Turkey due to domain names purchased from abroad. When the news came that the domain name business had been fixed and transferred to the BTK, I was happy, thinking that cyber security problems would be overcome and .tr domain names would increase.

The BTK established a structure called TRABIS. They gave the job to them. They announced that the system had now returned to "first come, first serve."

A few months passed. Recently, I went to Natro to buy a domain name. Oops, they started asking for documents again. Moreover, if you are an intermediary, that is, an agency doing business for a company, you have to bring their documents!!!

Why, you ask?

Turkey does not have a useful, generally accepted strategy that can be applied everywhere!

Because this does not exist, we either copy the strategy of a country we like or imitate what was done in the past. For this reason, the decisions we make are always wrong.

Because we do not have a strategy, we do not know how to say "decades." We cannot see far ahead…

Because we do not have a strategy, we do not know what kind of policy to produce regarding an emerging technology.

I researched whether anyone had pondered this before me. Someone had! The late Doğan Kuban. He was the only name I could find.

We must have a strategy! One that belongs to us! Like a Turk….