youtube.com problems

This weekend Youtube.com was temporarily shut down due to the Pakistan government officials believing that the site was airing digital images that were putting down the Islamic religion. Originally the shutdown was just for Pakistan but accidentally the entire website was put out of order while trying to apply the censorship. Critics believe that the “mix-up” was not so accidental but more a way of Pakistan showing that it was in power of this site and they could eliminate one of the most popular websites with ease. I think that the excuse of having negative images of the Islamic faith is a mere excuse to have a slight power trip and show the rest of the world that they had power. Most people do not know where websites are based out of or how they are controlled so when things like this happen it can be a red flag to users. There is somewhat of a trust factor with the internet because so much information is available out there. A nation state or other adversary could stir up diplomatic trouble by toying with this sort of trust built into the Internet. What would our government make of it if all of a sudden all traffic destined for .gov domains wound up in China or North Korea? We do not stop to think about these things when we are using the internet day to day and it can be an eye opener to see incidents such as the youtube.com closing. We should be wary and think about how we use the internet and what we allow to be made public.