INTERNET
Pakistan blamed for YouTube outage
25-02-2008
by Emmet Ryan
Reactions by the Pakistani Government to images of the Prophet Muhammad on YouTube have been blamed for a near two-hour global outage on the video website on Sunday.
The video-sharing company blamed the outage on erroneous routing of information introduced by Pakistani internet service provider PCCW. Traffic to YouTube was misrouted for around two hours, rendering the site inaccessible for many users around the world on Sunday. The outage occurred after Pakistan chose to block YouTube over what it saw as content deemed offensive to Islam.
YouTube is still blocked in Pakistan but this may just be a temporary situation as moves are reportedly already afoot to resolve the dispute. The Pakistani Government is asking YouTube to remove objectionable content, according to a spokeswoman for the Pakistani Telecommunications Authority. If YouTube removes the content Pakistan may once again let its people post and view video clips on the site.
It is unclear what the video or videos in question depict, but a Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) official told the Associated Press that the PTA blocks websites that show controversial drawings of the Prophet Muhammad. Reports online suggest the content in question may include the Danish cartoons featuring the Prophet Muhammad which caused controversy when they were published in 2005 and then republished in 2006.
It's tough to call which way YouTube will go on this matter. On one hand the video sharing site will be less than pleased with the Pakistani Government as in their eyes the outage was the result of Pakistan's efforts to block the site. The flip side is that there are a whole lot of people living in Pakistan, over 160 million, and the video sharing site would rather have access to these citizens than remain blocked.
The most likely solution is that both sides will meet somewhere in the middle. Rather than removing the video or videos in question, YouTube and the Pakistani ISPs could come to an arrangement where the content deemed offensive remains blocked in Pakistan but the rest of the website would once again become accessible.
