already downgraded its outlook of internet freedom in the country to "Not Free," noting in its report that the assessment was made before further restrictions following the abortive military coup in July. With regard to Internet censorship, in the 2017 Report on media freedom and freedom of expression in Turkey, the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe found out: the increase of blocking and filtering of web pages; an increased practice of resorting to bandwidth throttling during times of domestic crises, making certain social media and platforms inaccessible.; cases of full internet shutdowns; Increase of prosecutions and detentions for online activities causing a great chilling effect (a.k.a. self-censorship). In earlier years, the Turkish government implemented legal and institutional reforms driven by the country's ambitions to become a European Union member state. At the same time Turkey demonstrated its high sensitivity to defamation and other "inappropriate" online content, resulting in the closure of a number of local and international Web sites. All Internet traffic passes through Türk Telekom’s infrastructure, allowing centralized control over online content and facilitating the implementation of shutdown decisions. In December 2010 the OpenNet Initiative, a non-partisan organization based in Canada and the United States that investigates, analyzes, and exposes Internet filtering and surveillance practices, classified Internet censorship in Turkey as selective (third lowest of four classifications) in the political, social, and Internet tools areas and found no evidence of censorship in the conflict/security area. However, also in 2010, Reporters Without Borders added Turkey to its list of 16 countries "under surveillance" (the less serious of two Internet censorship lists that it maintains), saying: In July 2010 the Alternative Informatics Association organized one of the first and largest street protests against Internet censorship in Istanbul. A second protest took place in May 2011 with demonstrations in 30 cities in Turkey. In its Freedom on the Net 2016 report, Freedom House gave Turkey a "freedom on the net status" of "not free" saying that: Mobile and internet connections were repeatedly suspended in Yuksekova, Cizre, Sur, Silopi, and other cities in the southeast of the country during raids by security agencies against militants; Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube were temporarily blocked on numerous occasions—typically in the aftermath of terrorist attacks—until they restricted access to specific posts or accounts; Turkey accounted for almost 90 percent of all content that was locally restricted by Twitter in the second half of