Oops…Russia bans YouTube

But it’s supposedly “by mistake.” Web-surfing Russians endured a brief scare Wednesday, November 21 that the authorities had blocked YouTube after the video-sharing website appeared on a list of banned addresses, in what officials later called a “technical mistake.” The new registry of blacklisted websites introduced this month showed the website youtube.com as having been added there by Russia’s consumer protection agency and remained on it for several minutes. After a media furor, the agency’s head Gennady Onishchenko told Russian news agencies that the intention was to ban 22 specific videos, rather than the whole service, notably ones giving instructions on how to commit suicide. Russians have been worried about an impending Internet crackdown ever since the hasty recent passage of a law which introduced the concept of the blacklist.


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