Kenya’s state-owned telephone company has blocked internet ”instant messaging” programmes and secure corporate communication channels in an attempt to crack down on illegal telephone calls, internet providers said on Thursday.
The move amounts to internet censorship, said the Kenyan association of private internet service providers.
Telkom Kenya, which controls the country’s sole internet gateway Jambonet, installed filters this week that block transmission of internet phone calls, popular chat programmes like Microsoft Messenger, and virtual private networks (VPN).
”Many organisations, especially multinational corporations, depend on VPN technology for secure transmissions of sensitive information over the public Internet,” said Sammy Buruchara, speaking for Kenya’s internet service providers and cyber-cafe operators.
”Kenyan corporations have experienced losses amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars since the implementation of the blocking filters,” Buruchara told a news conference in the capital Nairobi.
A Telkom spokesman said Thursday that the filters were installed to stop Kenyans from making illegal long-distance telephone calls via the internet.
”Our licence does not allow us to facilitate voice-over-internet,” spokesman Joseph Ogutu, told Deutsche Presse Agentur dpa. Telkom has a monopoly on international
telecommunications from Kenya.
Ogutu said instat messaging ”chat” programmes were not intended to be blocked. ”I’ll have to consult with our technical people to see if it is possible to distinguish between chat programmes and making telephone calls,” he said.
The internet providers and cybercafe owners demanded an end to Telkom’s monopoly of the internet gateway. – Sapa-DPA