Last week, the Pakistani Government ordered all Internet service providers to block the YouTube website for containing "blasphemous" content and material considered offensive to Islam. Other officials said the site had been blocked because it contained controversial sketches of the Prophet Mohammed, which were republished by Danish newspapers earlier this month.

One tech blogger reported "Unfortunately, the method used by Pakistan Telecom was to advertise false domain routing for IP addresses owned by YouTube. This would have worked fine if not for the fact that the false routing information leaked out of Pakistan and shut down routing world-wide, knocking YouTube off the air for a couple hours."

The recent moves places Pakistan amid Communist China for censorship of the internet.  Good thing that could never happen in the U.S.  Or could it?

October, the Treasury Department ordered a domain (website addresses are called domains) registrar to block use and access to an online travel agency that provides trips to Cuba.  The travel agency—run by an Englishman named Steve Marshall who lives in Spain—is targeted at European travelers and not Americans.  But unfortunately for Marshall he registered his domain with a U.S. company, making it susceptible to U.S. law.

This wasn't the first website ban by Uncle Sam either.  A few weeks ago, WikiLeaks, a whistle-blowing website was shut down, following a lawsuit against it in which the plaintiff, Swiss Bank Julius Baer, claimed the site published libelous information and incriminating proprietary documents.   The U.S. District Judge assigned to the case order the part of the website displaying the documents to be shut down. 

And of course there's the banning of websites like MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube that enable document and file sharing by the Defense Department in May 2007.  Granted, this ban simply blocked access to the sites at work, but many in the military use the sites to communicate with people back home.