The incumbent president Askar Akaev is represented in the www-community by the URL www.akaev.kg. The website is well structured, frequently updated and bilingual although the English sites are currently under construction. Recently, an article on Akaev’s website announced that the upcoming elections will definitely be free and fair.

Information about Felix Kulov, the leader of the Kyrgyz opposition, who refused to participate in the necessary Kyrgyz language test on September 18^th and who will therefore not be registered as a candidate for the Presidential Elections on October 29^th, can be found under http://homepage.kg/~arnamys/. This is his party’s website which also lives up to international standards. According to the hit counter on the site, it’s among the Kyrgyz Top 40 websites with more than 500 hits per week.

Another very interesting website which is frequently visited by internet user in Kyrgyzstan is The Kyrgyz Political Kitchen (http://kyrgyzpol.narod.ru/) with its "hot news", a page where you can even participate in an online vote. Here you have the choice between Askar Akaev, Almazbek Ismankulov, Felix Kulov, Absamat Masaliev, Daniyar Usenov or you can just vote against all of the candidates. But today out of the given five only Akaev himself is registered. Still, Felix Kulov leads the poll with an amazing 52% of the overall votes (281 votes are registered as of today). In addition to that, it is illegal to publish the results of public opinion polls in the mass media from the moment of registration of candidates (Kyrgyz Election Code, Art. 31.3 Campaigning timeframe) and the owner of the website breaks the Kyrgyz law with the online poll. TV stations and radio stations had major problems with the Central Election Commission during the Parliamentary Elections in February concerning this article of the Election Code.

So far, the website is up and running and it doesn’t look like anybody will do anything about. Maybe it’s because the authorities do not care about the internet as much as they do about other mass media. But then, Politika KG (http://www.politkg.boom.ru/), a website initiated by Meder Imakeev, a graduate of the Kyrgyz Technical University, is currently inaccessible. According to the European Institute for the Media in Dusseldorf, Germany, the home page says that the site will be under reconstruction until October 29th, 2000, the day of the Presidential Elections. The EIM comments: "Analysts believe that the reason for closing the site was the start of the election campaign and, possibly, pressure exerted on the ISP." Delo No., the most popular Russian-language newspaper in Kyrgyzstan and itself under enormous pressure from the authorities, writes about the same website: "Earlier this homepage regularly published objective information on country goings-on, covered in a balanced way. Users could see an official point of view as well as opinion of defenders, independent NGOs and opposition. Many defenders, Kyrgyz Committee on Human Rights in particular, which chairman Ramazan Dyryldaev is in a political exile, think that homepage reconstruction is related to the upcoming presidential elections."

With this question answered, we turn to the next and most interesting one: Who will claim the vacant domain www.president.kg for himself when the votes are counted on October 29^th?