14 DAY TRIAL // Back in May, the popular online video sharing service YouTube was entirely banned in Morocco, but the local authorities refused to confirm or deny the rumors. In fact, it all started from the blog owners who wrote on their pages that YouTube was blocked in their country because several clips were insulting the constitutional monarchy. Today, after almost one month, the truth is somehow revealed because the local authorities controlling the Internet sustained the ban was caused by a server glitch that affected only one webpage.
"They've clearly blocked YouTube," university student Abdelhakim Albarkani told the Associated Press according to The Daily Titan. "I'm worried because YouTube allowed us to see things the state newspapers and television won't show."
The same source sustained that this statement is quite hard to believe because the Moroccan government blocked Google Earth in 2006 after numerous sensitive locations were displayed on the mapping tool.
However, this was not the first time when the online video sharing service was blocked in an entire country because of the content uploaded on the official page. Take the example of Turkey, the country that banned YouTube due to several videos that insulted its citizens. After several weeks of unavailability, YouTube removed the clips and then become accessible to the Turkish users.
A Thai case was even more interesting because the local authorities informed the online video sharing service about the existence of several clips insulting the country's guidelines. After the parent company Google analyzed the videos, it refused to remove them because it considered they don't infringe the YouTube guidelines. Because the Mountain View company refused to delete the clips, the service got banned in the entire country. After a long period of inactivity, YouTube decided to remove some of the clips but refused to delete all of them, as some videos didn't infringe their guidelines.