Bangladesh- where we have a broad constitution, a well written one. We covered almost everything needed to be included in the constitution; from our basic rights to freedom of speech, from right to get lawful support to freedom in our daily life. But you know what, the reality is totally different. And when I'm writing this, I have to keep this on my mind if the government sees this, my writing, what would be the consequences? So you better guess how we are living!

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There are 'traps' in different 'sections' of the constitution so that the government can use them for their own purpose. You may wonder why the government will try to oppress the citizens. Well, the 'power game' is totally different in my country. Our media is restricted, social media activity of the commoners are restricted. So, how come we say that we have freedom of speech. And, if you ask about the 'restriction over the internet', I will day what can I do with all the internet facility if I don't have freedom of speech.

Internet Speed is one of the basic things to operate smoothly these days. While the Internet speed in Bangladesh is not very fast. And, the government has several records to cut the bandwidth and limit the speed so citizens can't do much uploading controversial videos against the government and so on. But I have to approve that the government took different initiatives to increase internet speed to encourage users. Also, the government is trying to involve more youth to 'freelancing' to reduce the ratio of unemployment. Though the cost of the internet is still very high in my country, it's gradually becoming reasonable.

I would say, there's no internet restriction in Bangladesh, rather there's 'censorship and surveillance' over the usage.

Let me explain a little bit!

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There's a specific section which empowers the government to take action against anyone they feel offended. A good number of cases have been filed against different journalists since March 1 this year under this section 57 of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) Act. No matter whether it's a news report or our social media status. The recent government made an amendment which now lets them to to make arrests without a warrant. And the maximum jail term was raised to 14 years to ten years. You can understand how is the situation. Everyone is now very conscious of what they are writing, saying to any newspaper and everything.

Moreover, there's a shadow censorship' that happens when it comes to publishing anything in the internet world. Any book, online article, reports, and even social media status are included in the list. No, newspaper, online new media, tv channel will publish or telecast anything that hampered the images of the government. And, I'm not talking about any specific government, it's a common mentality of the ruler.

If I talk about 'freelancing' and 'cryptocurrency'; there's actually no restriction. The government is very open towards these as I have said earlier. But the 'gap' is we still can't access "PayPal" from Bangladesh. So you can understand the opportunity for freelancing is not very wide. Also, different freelancing sites don't let us log in from our country's location. The government is not very eager and helpful to solve all these.

Cryptocurrency is still not very popular in my country. Only a handful of people actually knows and works on this. So the government is still not concern about the transaction and they don't take any action yet to help, protect or restrict it.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Online freedom is actually far away if you see things from our perspective. But I support some sort of restriction like restriction over 'Adult Sites' is mandatory. As many parents don't know how to teach their kids about these things and how to control them. But here, it becomes very common to restrict 'Facebook' during the local and national elections. Because many of the population are still uneducated or less educated, they believe any rumor very easily and they spread rumors quickly. Which creates a bad impact on the election. It's understandable, but there should be other measures to reduce such events.

I believe it will take many years to achieve 'freedom'. And it's a long way to change the mentality of the government. This is the irony of our country, that they say it's a 'People's Republic' country and they named it 'Digital Bangladesh'!

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