Friday 7 March 2008

Will Censorship Destroy the Internet?

In February 2008, the Pakistani government ordered the video sharing site YouTube to be taken out of service for containing un-Islamic material. There was a two hour outage of the site which was apparently caused by 'erroneous Internet protocols' sourced in Pakistan. It was reported that YouTube had some Danish cartoons published on the site which contained references to the prophet Muhammad. In essence, the Pakistan Telecom Authority hijacked the YouTube server to block the site around the world. The question here is to what extent should governments been able to intervene when it comes to the Internet? Surely this is another case of taking away freedom of speech? Was the Internet not devised to create a platform for freedom of speech in the first place which isn't always easily accessible in the real world?

Click here to view the rest of this article and learn more about the author, Marc Steel

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