Putting a Box Around the Tube Governments See Risk in Internet Sharing Sites

By Eric Pfanner

As YouTube, the Internet video-sharing service, generates millions of new fans in far-flung countries, it is making enemies of some of their governments. Many are putting pressure on the company to tailor, or self-censor, its site to take account of local sensibilities, analysts say.

So far, YouTube, which Google acquired in November for $1.6 billion, has refused to back down in its standoff with the military- appointed government of Thailand, which recently cut off access to YouTube over a video that denigrated the country’s king, Bhumibol Adulyadej.

But Thailand is only one of a growing number of countries that are worried about the power of Internet video, which cuts across linguistic borders and allows individuals anywhere to publish dissident tracts, sexually risque films or other undesirable “user- generated content.”

Since April 11, for instance, China has quietly blocked access to DailyMotion, a French video-sharing site, for unexplained reasons, company executives said.

“You’ve got this explosive growth in the popularity of YouTube, and a lot of countries feel threatened by this,” said Ronald Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto and a member of the Open Net Initiative, a group of academics who monitor Internet censorship.

“Governments are getting more savvy about the way people use these tools to promote revolutions,” Deibert said.

Though YouTube is based in the United States, much of its recent growth has come overseas. According to ComScore Networks, which tracks Internet traffic, three-quarters of the 134 million unique visitors to YouTube in February were outside North America, with the Middle East and Africa recording the most rapid increases.

YouTube says that a big part of its appeal is that it provides would-be video stars, and their fans, with a single, global platform, unlike localized user-generated content sites.

“YouTube remains committed to creating a community where people from around the world can express themselves and share their views,” said Julie Supan, head of global communications at YouTube.

But analysts say localization would be a logical step in the wake of Google’s acquisition. Google has embraced the idea of local versions for its search engine, introducing separate sites for more than 100 countries.

YouTube declined to comment on whether it was considering such a move, which might not come without criticism. Google’s decision last year to censor the Chinese version of its search engine, Google.cn, to placate government concerns drew scorn from some free-speech advocates.

Analysts say there are several ways in which YouTube could be adapted for international markets. The company could, like the Google search engine, create local-language sites, denoted with separate suffixes like .fr for France or .cn for China.

Or the company could keep the single address, www.youtube.com, and automatically send users in different countries to local versions, a process called geographical zoning. These sites could have entirely different content or could simply block access to certain material in some markets, analysts say.

DailyMotion, for instance, uses this approach to send users to any of five different sites, depending on where the users are located, to comply with local laws.

“It wouldn’t be that difficult technologically for YouTube to do geographical zoning,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University. “But it is partial censorship.”

For now, YouTube relies on a two-step editing method to try to ensure that videos comply with the site’s “terms of use,” which state that material deemed to be pornographic, violent or racist, among other things, is unwelcome.

The site asks users to flag any videos they see as inappropriate; editors at YouTube then review these clips and have the final say on whether they stay up or go.

The problem with this system is that video that seems inoffensive to viewers in San Bruno, California, where YouTube is based, can be incendiary in other places, at least to some individuals or governments.

Supan said YouTube hoped to resolve the dispute in Thailand “in the near future.” But Thailand, which called the video of the king “insulting,” is not the only country to take action against YouTube.

A Turkish court last month responded to clips that appeared to denigrate Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, by ordering Internet providers to block access to YouTube. Iran has been barring YouTube and several other Western Web sites since December, objecting to “corrupting” influences.

In general, Deibert said, Internet censorship is on the rise globally. The Open Net Initiative found that over the past year, more than two dozen countries regularly blocked sites entirely or filtered out content they considered offensive.

As recently as 2002, only China, Iran and Saudi Arabia did so, he said.

Though YouTube has balked at the Thai government’s demand that it remove the video of the king, it sometimes gives in to similar requests. It pulled one of the Ataturk clips, for instance, whereupon service was restored in Turkey.

From time to time, YouTube has also removed other videos that might have passed muster in the United States. Last year, for instance, it dropped a clip of a model, Daniela Cicarelli, frolicking on a beach in Brazil with her boyfriend, after a court in that country ordered Internet service providers to block access to YouTube.

Last autumn, YouTube took down videos posted by the National Democratic Party, a far-right group in Germany that wanted to use YouTube for weekly broadcasts.

Other American Internet companies have had to adjust their European sites to take account of laws in several countries prohibiting the display of Nazi imagery.

Analysts say it is unclear what YouTube might have to do about videos dealing with Nazi themes, which are not hard to find on YouTube. Elsewhere, politicians have spoken out against YouTube for another reason, contending that it encourages “cyber-bullying.”

Alan Johnson, the British Education Secretary, called on YouTube not to carry videos of students insulting each other or their teachers, apparently an increasingly popular genre of video in Britain. In several countries, individual schools have blocked access to YouTube over similar issues.

Internet experts are watching closely for any developments in China. YouTube says it has not encountered any censorship there, though the government routinely filters out Internet content about topics like “democracy” and “Tiananmen Square.”

For now, that means even the Chinese can still find on YouTube the famous video of a lone dissident standing in the path of a tank during the uprisings in 1989, analysts say.

But Beijing’s move to block access to DailyMotion prompted speculation that it might soon apply pressure to Google to adapt YouTube for the Chinese market.

“They are probably saying, ‘You censored your search engine – now you have to censor YouTube,’ ” said Julien Pain, head of the Internet freedom desk at Reporters Sans Frontieres in Paris. “If Google agrees to censor YouTube, then the Chinese will have won. We’re already on a slippery slope.”

(c) 2007 International Herald Tribune. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.