Pakistan Blocks You Tube Part Two

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=5S3OA3nJRBQ[/youtube]

Geert Wilders Promo for film Forbidden

Yesterday evening Flap had the story about the government of Pakistan ordering the block of American media giant You Tube because of Islamic religious objections.

First, it was the Mohammed Cartoons and international newspaper censorship and riots in the Muslim world. Now, it is the government of Pakistan censoring electronic media, You Tube, in the name of religion.

Pakistan has ordered all Internet service providers to block the YouTube website for containing “blasphemous” content and material considered offensive to Islam, officials said Sunday.

An inter-ministerial committee has decided to block YouTube because it contained “blasphemous content, videos and documents,” a government official told Agence France-Presse. “The site will remain blocked till further orders.”

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) told the country’s 70 Internet service providers Friday that the popular website would be blocked until further notice, the Associated Press reports.

The authority did not specify what the offensive material was, but a PTA official said the ban concerned a movie trailer for an upcoming film by Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders, who has said he plans to release an anti-Koran movie portraying the religion as fascist and prone to inciting violence against women and homosexuals.

The PTA official, who asked not to be identified because he was not an official spokesman, said the PTA also blocks web sites that show controversial drawings of the prophet Muhammad.

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=j0jUuzdfqfc[/youtube]

An extended interview with popular Dutch Member of Parliament Geert Wilders on his upcoming anti-Koran film for Dutch television. Also discussed – Muslim immigration, tolerance and democracy.

But, apparently, Pakistan blocked more than just Pakistan’s access to You Tube.

Most of the world’s Internet users lost access to YouTube for several hours Sunday after an attempt by Pakistan’s government to block access domestically affected other countries.

The outage highlighted yet another of the Internet’s vulnerabilities, coming less than a month after broken fiber-optic cables in the Mediterranean took Egypt off line and caused communications problems from the Middle East to India.

An Internet expert explained that Sunday’s problems arose when a Pakistani telecommunications company accidentally identified itself to Internet computers as the world’s fastest route to YouTube. But instead of serving up videos of skateboarding dogs, it sent the traffic into oblivion.

On Friday, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority ordered 70 Internet service providers to block access to YouTube.com, because of anti-Islamic movies on the video-sharing site, which is owned by Google.

The block was intended to cover only Pakistan, but extended to about two-thirds of the global Internet population, starting at 1:47 p.m. ET Sunday, according to Renesys Corp., a Manchester, N.H., firm that keeps track of the pathways of the Internet for telecommunications companies and other clients.

The greatest effect was in Asia, were the outage lasted for up to two hours, Renesys said.

And, why?

To silence Dutch member of Parliament Geert Wilders who just happens to have an anti-radical Islamic film about to debut on You Tube.

No freedom of speech in Pakistan. But, other countries had better work with Google to correct the ability of one country to limit internet access to the rest of the world.

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Pakistan Blocks You Tube