If at some point on Sunday afternoon you tried to access YouTube and couldn't get to the site, you weren't alone. For nearly two hours, YouTube was inaccessible to about two-thirds of the world after the Pakistani government asked its Internet service providers to block Pakistan citizens' access to the site due to a video that portrays Islam in a negative way, according to USA Today.
The Pakistani government does not, however, take responsibility for causing the outage and attributed the problem to a "malfunction" that must have occurred elsewhere, Shahzada Alam Malik, head of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, told the Associated Press Television News in the USA Today article.
The offensive content was not explicitly described, but the Pakistani government referred to a trailer of a film by Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders. The government claims the video shows Islam as a fascist and violent religion targeting women and homosexuals.
Eric Leung, a junior biological sciences major, was on the YouTube site when the outage occurred. He was listening to music when all of a sudden the page would not refresh.
"I just thought the site was down. I didn't know it was related to that," Leung said. "I don't think they should be blocking Web sites. Just because you show it, it doesn't mean people have to believe it."
Pakistan's population is over 98 percent Muslim, according to the Pakistani government's Web site.
Derek Lackaff, a communication instructor who researches mass media, doesn't think Pakistan's technique of blocking specific Web sites is effective.
"It's interesting that [Pakistan's actions] had a global affect...the bigger picture is that, yes censorship is possible, but it's really difficult to block specific types of content or videos because there are so many means of transferring information," Lackaff said. "The only way to do so is if you do what China does...which is an endeavor to filter the entire Internet. If you try and do it site by site, you're not going to be able to keep the information out of people's hands."
Leung thinks that censorship of individual videos is something that happens often.
"I think it already happens without us knowing - YouTube videos are taken down a lot. As a user, I'm not sure if they're actions of the government or for users," Leung said.
While many may not have noticed the outage, media coverage of the widespread event may draw more attention to the content of the video, reversing the effect of Pakistan's efforts to censor it, according to Lackaff.
"It creates publicity and draws even more attention to the content," he said.
Internet censorship is not something that happens solely outside the U.S. For example, Comcast is going through a congressional investigation for filtering, or throttling, BitTorrent traffic. Also, AOL found itself in the hot seat when it didn't deliver e-mails that contained a petition Web site that campaigned against its proposed certified-mail program that proposed an "e-mail tax," according to CNET.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
