The internet in Saudi Arabia

While most of the rest of the world has embraced the internet this is not the case for Saudi Arabia. The internet was not widely available until 2001 and even then it has not been widely used. There are several reasons for this but almost all of them come back to the government's fear of the internet. No country censors its use more than Saudi Arabia.

Use of the internet is not all that common is Saudi Arabia with only about twenty percent of the population using it. There are several reasons for this but the biggest is that the government has not made it easy to get online. Until recently the only internet service provider was a government corporation and the service they provided was very poor. Recently private companies have been allowed to start offering service but government rules severely restrict what they can offer. The result is that the quality of the internet service in Saudi Arabia is very low which has resulted in few people wanting to use it. The situation is made even worse by the poor customer service on the part of the government's ISP company.

Despite the low quality of the internet in Saudi Arabia the price to use it is very high. This is again due in large part to the fact that the government pretty much monopolizes the service. They have had no incentive to bring the price down since the government has forced the private service providers to set their prices at levels that are similar to the governments. The high price has done nothing to help encourage people in Saudi Arabia to use the internet.

Of course encouraging people to use the internet is the last thing that the Saudi government wants to do. On the contrary they have been trying to limit its use. This is a big part of the reason that the internet service in the country is so bad. They have been forced into providing it by demands of the citizens but the government is clearly trying to do all it can to restrict the number of people who are going online. The reason for this is that the Saudi government views the internet as a threat.

The government of Saudi Arabia not only views the internet as a threat to its own power but also to the country's way of life. As a very devout Islamic nation a lot of what is on the internet is deemed inappropriate and as a result is censored. Saudi Arabia probably censors the internet more than any other nation in the world. For the most part this is done with sophisticated technology to keep people from visiting certain websites. This has certainly helped to reduce the number of people in the country who use the internet and this is not likely to change anytime soon.