Use of internet in the Arab world

Like most of the world Arabs spend a great deal of time on the internet. However they do not use it nearly as much as people in other countries. There are a several reasons for this but for the most part it is because governments in the region consider the internet to be a threat. As a result they have attempted to control access to the internet, something at which they have only been partially successful.

The Arab world were rather late comers to using the internet with widespread use not really starting until about ten years after it had in the rest of the world. A part of the problem was that Arabic characters are not all that easy to use on a computer. As a result there were few people in the region who had a computer let alone an internet connection. For the most part the use of the internet was restricted to the small percentage of the population who were able to speak English. The problem of using Arabic characters on computer has only partially been overcome but it is enough to get people using the internet.

The other reason that the internet came late to the Arab business world is that it is very expensive to get an internet connection. This is largely because of the governments in most countries have a monopoly on providing telecommunication services and they charge a very high price. The cost has come down over the years as people have started to demand better and cheaper access but it is still more expensive to get online in most of the Arab world than it is in other places.

It really wasn't until about five years ago that the Arab world really started to embrace the internet with the majority of the population actually using. These days most people in the region do get online although even now the numbers lag behind the rest of the world. In part this is because of the high cost of getting online but it also has a lot to do with the fact that the use of the internet in the Arab world is heavily censored.

In the early years of the internet the governments in the Arab world controlled access to the internet by making it difficult and expensive to get online. However now that most people are using the internet they have had to change tactics. The approach used these days is mostly to block certain sites that are considered to be unacceptable to the rulers. A lot of these are sites that the government views as a threat because the espouse revolutionary ideas. However many of the sites are banned because they are considered to be counter to the beliefs of Islam. This would include all sites that show pornography, homosexuality and gambling.