YouTube outage. So..?

Well, YouTube's problems on Sunday seem to me to be one of the symptoms of the times.

Whether politically-based or not, the re-routing of traffic away from YouTube by Pakistani ISPs was a small-minded move in my opinion. The internet is not something you can have bits of. You can't order it like a pizza and pick off the jalapeños. You buy into it or not.

One way of looking at this is a kind of cultural test of your nation's tolerance. If you're not happy being part of the rest of the world, you are going to have problems in the future and as the web becomes ever more prevalent these problems are going to get a lot, lot worse.

I'm not sure what the solution is. If I knew that, I probably wouldn't be sitting here writing this but I do know that this situation cannot be ignored. At some point either the Pakistani authorities must accept the Internet and the global opinions that go with it (blasphemous content and all) or it must cut itself off from it and carry on alone.

However, I'm eager to know how YouTube will deal with this. I'll be a bit disappointed if they lower themselves to the level of people who order a pizza and then complain about the peppers. The only thing they really need to do is strengthen their 'bit' (pardon the pun) of the internet to ensure this doesn't happen again, however that may be achieved. The Pakistani Government — in this case — just need to be managed rather than confronted with threats of legal or other action. A bit of tolerance on both sides here would go a long way towards keeping our global culture stable and constructive.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, this planet has never in its history been in quite the situation it is now. The globalisation of culture may prove to be a dangerous thing.

Policy. Language. Economy. Copyright law. National security. Religion. The fundamentals of life in every country — indeed for each and every individual — need to be taken into consideration and the only way forward is not confrontation, blame or denial; more an opportunity to realistically assess the genuine needs of the individuals, corporations and governments the world over.

The balance of power in the Middle East will be very tightly fought and I think the Internet will be the prime catalyst in forcing the situation to a head. It's not going to be easy. I think there are difficult decisions ahead but I believe that we are living in exciting times and I would not want to live in any other.

The Global Politics of the Internet

So. Hotmail and Yahoo have both withdrawn access to their free webmail services from Iran. No surprise that Google's policies regarding this country haven't changed.

I believe we are seeing something of a cultural or political shift towards a have and have-not global society where countries are being either denied access externally or are internally filtering the Internet and its related services, such as email and the web.

Both of these situations are of course undesirable.

I'm happy to live in a country where I can openly write on a blog things that might portay my government as selfish, misguided or less than competent. It's called free speech and it's such a fundamental building block for an open, constructive society that it would go without saying if it weren't for lawyers. My Internet — once I've admitted a monthly usage charge — is essentially free. I use it like water. It's part of the make up of my life. To know that the greatest educational and social tool on the planet was being even partially denied me would be a massive issue, I'm sure most people would agree.

However, Hotmail and Yahoo's motivations here are the American Government, not the Iranian Government. This is essentially America saying 'Deny this part of the world access to that Internet resource.'

What does America think it's playing at here? It's only two out of countless services, but they are two of the largest in the world. If this isn't an proclamation of global superiority — even a very specialised and subtle one — I don't know what is.

In Iran, information denial is in place in the shape of Internet filtering as well as, more famously, the Great Firewall of China, but at least these policies are their country's own. Looks to me as if we are seeing the symptoms of the start of a cultural split on a scale hitherto unimagined in human history.