With almost half of the online video traffic wrapped up, Youtube is one of the most popular web sites in the world. The people of Pakistan have by and large missed out on the Youtube explosion because the e Pakistani government has placed repeated severe restraints on public access to the video sharing service. All of that changed Tuesday as the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority reversed course by allowing 70 of Pakistan’s Internet service providers to lift prior restrictions to the site.
According to Compete.com, almost 30 million people accessed Youtube in December 2006 alone. Those people logged in almost 87 million times making the video based social networking site one of the most heavily visited sites on the Internet. Youtube’s market share jumped considerable when Google, the world’s most used search engine, purchased Youtube in 2006. The combines Google and Youtube video sites captured 51 percent of the web’s video traffic.
Youtube was originally blocked on Friday after the government viewed a clip from a lawmaker from the Netherlands said that he would produce a movie on Youtube that portrayed the Islamic religion as violent and fascist. The clip resulted in the loss of access to Youtube for a large number of international Internet users on Sunday. The video clip was subsequently removed after the controversy reared its head. It was the removal that persuaded Pakistani officials to order access to Youtube restored to most of the country.
Northern Europeans have been in the crosshairs of the Muslim world since a Danish newspaper first published a cartoon of the prophet Mohammed with a bomb hidden in his turban. Muslims considered the cartoon offensive and staged mass protests in areas with large Muslim populations, including Syria, Egypt and Afghanistan. . Many European countries reprinted the controversial cartoon to express their support for free speech.
Pakistani officials ordered the block on Sunday and one telecommunication company directed traffic originally destined for you tube into cyberspace oblivion by sending requests into a black hole. This resulted in a Youtube block for Internet users in countries other than Pakistan because much of the world’s Youtube traffic is routed through one of Pakistan’s largest Internet service providers, which billed itself as the fastest way to get to Youtube.
The Youtube outage in areas outside of Pakistan brought attention to one of the Internet’s main weak points. The outage came less than four weeks after Egyptians lost Internet access when a fiber optic cable was severed in the Mediterranean. In addition to cutting Internet access to Egypt, the broken cable caused problems in communications throughout India and the Middle East.
The recent Middle Eastern outage affected the offshore banking industry as well as many United States corporations that have outsourced their customer service operations in India and other locations throughout the region.
The Youtube ban isn’t the first time a country has restricted access to the web site. Brazil banned the site 2007 after videos of a supermodel and her boyfriend were circulated on the web site without the boyfriend’s permission. The ban was lifted after less than a week.
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March 6th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
They had to in the end really, didn’t they. They made such a mess of trying to block the site that they were left with egg over their faces.
The block also raises a lot more questions with regards to how much a government should censor the web but that it a whole different kettle of fish.
March 9th, 2008 at 1:28 am
I’m glad they were lifted because, to be honest, censorship on the internet is a precarious topic. The more countries that censor popular websites, then the more acceptable it will start to become in the international forum and I, for one, am not ready to have my freedom sanctioned.
March 14th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
About time. I find it ridiculous to even consider the notion of banning the internet. If you do not like the ideas, you don’t HAVE to log on to whatever site, or read whatever article, or watch whatever video.
March 25th, 2008 at 12:22 am
Censorship on the internet doesnt really work. Those who are determined can easily find a way past it. Its pretty stupid for a government to block a website. Why can’t people chose which sites they want to visit? They are free to run their country as they want but I don’t approve of it.
March 27th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
I personally am glad that the ban was lifted. It is crazy to me to try to restrict the Internet. It is way too vast. You may block content that you do not want to be shown but then you may also restrict content that people need to see for research purposes.
April 13th, 2008 at 11:44 am
I think the whole ban is really silly to be honest. I think it just shows a governent being too controlling. Also like someone else said if you don’t like it, then don’t log onto it! What are they going to do next? Ban anything which has offensive material on it? That’s what parental controls are for!
April 14th, 2008 at 9:21 am
I’m surprised that the Pakistani people didn’t use a VPN service to bypass the censorship, but yes, censoring the internet takes it to far. It’s YouTube for gosh sakes, what can they see on there that they can’t see on the internet that they haven’t blocked?
April 15th, 2008 at 3:30 am
That’s good to hear; at least these governments are avoiding further protests in their area so I think it’s a good move for them. I think YouTube should also ensure all the videos that are made accessible will be fit for viewing in world wide.
April 21st, 2008 at 1:38 am
It’s about time that they allowed youtube to be viewed by their people because they are lots of information that you can get from youtube. Aside from those political hate videos, you can learn some new thing from the other videos that you didn’t know yet. I often visit youtube but when I do, I always find some useful stuff to place on my blog.
April 21st, 2008 at 3:21 am
YouTube cant go around looking for videos that might offend certain people. If you complain they’ll take it off. Thats what the Pakistani Government should have done instead of banning the site. It just shows how insecure they are but still they are better than a few other countries in the middle east.
April 23rd, 2008 at 2:08 am
I agree with devil here. Why should you deprive your people of a great site that could provide them some good information just because they has a video that is against your government when they can ask to have it remove in the first place. Besides Pakistan isn’t the only one that has gotten an offensive video from youtube.
April 28th, 2008 at 9:25 am
Censorship on the internet doesn’t work at all. There’s all different ways for people to get around it. A lot of people have offensive videos on youtube, but for a whole country to block a site is completely wrong and what kind of message is that sending to the rest of the world.
April 28th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
I am from Pakistan and i don’t bloody care if our Govt Bans YouTube or myTube or OurTube , Its not like we cant live without YouTube or YouTube is like the ultimate God that we should always pay our respects to.
May 1st, 2008 at 8:33 pm
The act of banning usually has the opposite effect of what the banners have in mind in the first place. In a way, the internet has made the censors job harder by allowing acess in multiple ways. For marketers, to get banned by authorities will be the biggest marketing coup.
May 2nd, 2008 at 7:41 am
If you are banning a site such as YouTube then you are the one who will get affected not youtube because they are one of most informational sites around the Net. Depriving your people of using it will only leaves them on the dark ages. This is not the wisest decision that Pakistan government has done.
May 4th, 2008 at 1:16 am
I think this decision is not too wise because YouTube gives people a chance to share their knowledge and creativity. It happened in Indonesia too, but only for a couple days because many people in Indonesia disagreed with this. Although they have some porn videos in YouTube, this is not the best way to stop it.
May 10th, 2008 at 4:53 am
In this age, even for a dictatorial government, it’s hard to shun their people from knowing what’s happening all over the world and how the international community is reacting to a given incident. It happened in Myanmar during the riots a few months back but eventually they had to open up again. The way people interact has changed tremendously and with media that can no longer be controlled by individual governments, word spreads no matter how hard they try to cover up.
May 17th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
“The outage came less than four weeks after Egyptians lost Internet access when a fiber optic cable was severed in the Mediterranean.”
Oh, my god, that’s terrifying! I would be miserable if that happened here.
What vttop said is interesting. Yet, there are still places where it’s nearly impossible to be granted permission to use the internet by the government..
As for inappropriate content - this is usually filtered out by Youtube.Although, I think they need to focus on this more. This is, as was said, an extremely popular site for kids even… there’s no need for things like that to be on it.
May 20th, 2008 at 11:49 pm
Well I think the reason to ban youtube is the clip which portrayed Islam as a fascist religion. It should not be used for such misleading and hurtful purposes. We do not have right to portray any religion in that way. At the same time, banning youtube is not the right way to approach the problem.
May 24th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
Even if you block a webpage, people will find a dozen ways to circumvent it. It’s a complete and utter waste of time, effort, and money.
YouTube has a Video Response feature for a reason. If you have a problem with how a video portrays something, make your own video that shows your own view.
June 22nd, 2008 at 11:50 pm
The good thing about the internet is that it opened up sources that would not be available. So opening this up as well, people will be able to access things that were once not available to them. I understand their wanting to block to a certain degree as they would not be able to be picky in what the people watched but in the end when all is said and done it is just easier to let people discern for themselves.