14 DAY TRIAL // Google's video sharing service YouTube got banned on Monday after an anti-Islam clip called Fitna was published on its official website, drawing protests from its Indonesian users. Last week, the Indonesian government set a Monday deadline to YouTube's administrators in order to allow them to remove the clip but, since it was still accessible, the country's ISPs blocked its access.
Since today, YouTube is available again after the country's officials have decided that blocking only the page with the offensive clip would be more useful for the local users, instead of banning the whole site.
"Access to YouTube and several other sites has been reopened after Internet providers received overwhelming protests from users. We discussed the complaints with the ministry and they agree with us," said Heru Nugroho of the Indonesian ISP association according to Interactive Investor.
However, the same source explains that users' pressure may be the main reason for unblocking the website as lots of consumers and small businesses requested the removal of the ban. "Many of our users use YouTube or Multiply for their business," the same official continued.
It may seem like the ban was lifted on April 9, 2008 as Andry, one of our readers, confirmed that Google's video sharing service re-became available: "As far as i know, most Indonesian ISPs (including government's ISP, Telkomnet) have unblocked YouTube, MySpace, etc. today (April 9, 2008). They did it because they received many complaints from the customers who can't access the sites," he wrote.
And yes, people considered the ban unacceptable, as many of them said that banning the entire YouTube site is not a solution to stop the distribution of the clip. Here's the comment of Avvi, another Softpedia reader: "I am a Muslim and am also offended by that video on YouTube, but the website ban is just too much, YouTube ban was too much and that MySpace ban is just ridiculously unreasonable. You might think that by banning YouTube would resolve the problem but no, hey we're not the only ones in Indonesia, we have people of other religions aswell and this would only result in bad image for the Muslims yet again."