March 25, 2009 by Matt Thomas
The Centre for democracy and Technology, an advocacy group promoting constitutional liberties in the modern age has criticised China’s decision to block its citizens from viewing YouTube claiming that the country’s actions ‘fail to live up to international norms.’
YouTube has been inaccessible to Chinese citizens since Monday when China cut access to the site. The BBC reported that the decision was taken after the site showed video footage of Chinese soldiers beating Tibetan Monks. However, YouTube claims not to know the reason that YouTube has been summarily denied access to such a huge user base, “We don’t know the reason for the block and are working to restore access to users in China as quickly as possible,” – Scott Rubin, YouTube spokesman.
China represents by far the biggest national population on the planet, and though many of them have no access to a computer average income is rising fast. For this reason, poor relations between Google (YouTube’s parent company) and the Chinese government could prove to be very bad news indeed.
At this stage it is impossible to tell when the Chinese population will be back on YouTube, if ever.
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