Finally, YouTube Becomes Accessible in Thailand

After months of unavailability, the online video sharing platform YouTube becomes available to the Thai users as the local government offered its approval. It seems like the folks working for YouTube managed to implement several filters that would be able to block the access of the Thai viewers to several clips flagged as inappropriate by the local authorities. The entire case was started about five months ago when YouTube was banned in the entire country for multiple videos published on its page which were insulting the Thai king. Although the government required YouTube to remove the clips, the video sharing platform refused to do so because they didn't infringe the service's guidelines.

Thailand had no other alternative than to ban YouTube in the entire country until the officials decide to remove the videos. After a short period of time, YouTube agreed to remove some of the clips and promised to become more focused on building filter to restrict the access to the other videos. Today, after such a long time, YouTube becomes available in Thailand because the engineers managed to implement a system that blocks the access to some of the clips.

"It was lifted after YouTube managed to find filter technology to screen out clips we do not want. In fact we told YouTube many months ago what we wanted, but they were only just now able to do that," Sitthichai Pookaiyaudoom, the minister for information and communication technology, said according to The Sydney Morning Herald. "It would be like books. Some books are banned for sale in Thailand, but you can buy them elsewhere," he added according to the Financial Times.

It seems like the YouTube representatives are starting to get rid of the copyright matters because, besides this problem with the Thai authorities, they also signed deals with the UK organizations to obtain licensed content that will be published on the page.