Tech Shout!

YouTube just keeps making it to the news week after week. A court ordered access to YouTube’s Web site to be blocked soon after a prosecutor recommended the ban because of videos allegedly insulting the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Alaturk.

After receiving the court order on Wednesday, Turkey’s largest telecommunications provider, Turk Telekom blocked access to the popular video-sharing Web site. They did so because the Google-owned Web site actually features videos that were seen in an insulting light on the founder of modern day Turkey.

This censorship is surely evidence of YouTube’s growing political as well as social resonance. It also throws light on the battle between Web biggies such as YouTube’s owner Google and foreign governments over free speech on the Internet.

According to Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li, YouTube and other technologies that allow users to share information “shift power away from central institutions to communities. “Whenever you hold a lot of power, you’re very threatened when that power is taken away from you. That’s what the Internet does, and that is what YouTube is doing,” said Li.

In Turkey, it is a crime punishable by imprisonment to insult “Turkishness”, and the statute is sometimes used to prosecute those who criticize official government policy on a wide range of sensitive issues.

The Hurriyet newspaper reported on Wednesday that YouTube had received tens of thousands of e-mails protesting the depiction of Ataturk as a homosexual, and that the video clips in question had been removed.