This is not the first website to be blocked in Pakistan.  Facebook was previously blocked due to…

 ”a row over a competition involving caricatures of Prophet Muhammad”

The Pakistani government has issued instructions to all the countries Internet service providers, instructing them to block access to the popular video website with immediate effect.

It is also being reported that some pages on Wikipedia are also being blocked.

Internet censorship, especially in democratic countries such as Australia and Pakistan will inevitably come under increasing scrutiny in the coming years after the United Nations’ recent announcement that unrestricted Internet access should be considered a “basic human right”.  The UN has yet to issue a statement, though we can assume that private discussions may well be taking place between Pakistani and UN officials in New York or Geneva.

So what does this mean for freedom on speech and freedom of expression?  I don’t believe anybody should get too concerned about countries such as Australia and Pakistan censoring certain websites over religious or adult content sensibilities at the moment.  The Internet is such a vast, and completely free (some would even say anarchistic) wonderland, that all countries around the world, including the US and western Europe, are still trying to figure out how this all fits in with their own privacy, copyright and defamation laws.

The time is coming though for the United Nations to set out what is and is not acceptable on the Internet.  This will give countries guidelines for blocking content that other people will consider perfectly acceptable.

An order was given to ban Youtube in Pakistan and instead of banning the IPs of the Youtube servers they decided to do this the clever way. Rerouting all Youtube IPs to appropriate content was the way to go they thought. What they did not realize at this point, or maybe they did, was that this affected ALL of the Internet because of their meddling with BGP routes.

The effect was that all Youtube traffic was redirected and that the Pakistani Internet providers had to handle all IP requests. Youtube was gone for a time and so was the Pakistani Internet not capable of handling all those incoming traffic of one of the busiest websites in the world.

This is obviously a huge flaw that there are no security barriers for something like this to happen, that an ISP in one country can affect the Internet on such a large scale.