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YouTube and the black hole of Pakistan - February 26, 2008

Now that's what I call notice-and-takedown. In an effort to prevent a single YouTube video, deemed offensive to Islam and a potential public safety hazard, from being viewed in Pakistan, telecom officials in the South Asian nation managed to disrupt YouTube service around the world for two hours on Sunday. According to reports, Pakistani authorities were concerned that video related to a new film by Dutch director Geert Wilders, known for his strongly anti-Islam views, could spark riots such as occurred after a Danish newspaper in 2006 published cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, and ordered YouTube blocked.

According to later reports, Pakistan Telecom apparently tried to block YouTube traffic into Pakistan by creating a dummy routing protocol that sent YouTube requests into an Internet "black hole." Unfortunately, it also sent the dummy route to PCCW, a Hong Kong-based entry way that connects Pakistan Telecom--among other network operators--to the broader Internet. That caused at least 97 other major networks around the world unwittingly to route YouTube requests into the same black hole.

Telecom experts are quoted in various reports calling the problem "rare," but not something YouTube or any other application developer could do much about. But it led Media Wonk to wonder about the recent push to start filtering certain kinds of content from the Web--particularly the sort of network-level filtering that AT&T is planning and that content owners are pushing.

I have no technical expertise, but I doubt AT&T would attempt anything as crude as what Pakistan Telecom tried. Still, it's worth at least tipping our hats to the Law of Unintended Consequences. On an interconnected system like the Internet, acting to block the transmission of content in one place--essentially blocking the basic functionality of the Net--could well have unexpected and unwanted consequences somewhere else.

For instance, as I discussed in my last post, Comcast's efforts to offload some BitTorrent traffic by shunting it off on other network operators could eventually become a source of conflict with other ISPs and network backbone providers.

I wonder how well we've really thought through the potential unintended effects of filtering.





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