For the soldiers' ban

May 18, 2007 19:56 GMT  ·  By

Google's representatives offered a funny reply to the recently imposed ban for the US soldiers looking for entertainment content on YouTube. Earlier this week, the Pentagon blocked YouTube on all the computers connected to the Defense Department network because they regarded the website as a loss of bandwidth. However, Google's officials replied with a funny statement, accusing the Pentagon for inventing the Internet.

"They said it might be a bandwidth issue, but they created the Internet, so I don't know what the problem is," Chief Executive Chad Hurley sustained according to the BusinessWeek. "We'd like to explore what's at issue here and talk about what we can do to sort out what's the issue here," YouTube spokeswoman Julie Supan added.

Although the Pentagon blocked the access to numerous social networks such as YouTube, MySpaace and 11 other pages, the only officials that replied belonged to the Mountain View company.

However, this is not the first time when YouTube gets banned on an entire network because the online video sharing service encountered even more important problems. For example, YouTube was entirely banned in Thailand because the product published several clips that were offending the country's king. Although the local authorities contacted the parent company Google to remove the videos, YouTube refused them because they considered that the clips didn't infringe any guideline. Because the king's criticism is prohibited in the entire country, the Thai government decided to block the entire service until YouTube agreed to remove the clips. Recently, Google announced that some of the movies were already deleted from the page and was working with the local authorities to remove the remaining ones.

In the past, YouTube was also banned in Turkey because numerous clips offending the country's residents were posted on the site. Although the company agreed to remove them, YouTube was unavailable until the employees managed to delete them all.