Actually, you can blame this one directly on political fear. Recently, video footage of Chinese police savagely beating prone Tibetan protesters got posted onto YouTube. Next thing you know, WHAM! Blocked.

There's a lot of precedent for this, too. The government blocked the whole iTunes store when a music single with the word "Tibet" in it hit the front page. They frequently ban news sites whenever news from Tibet (especially negative news) hits. It doesn't last forever, though. After things simmer down, they'll usually lift the general block and just keep targeted blocks on specific stories or pages.

I'm hoping YouTube comes back soon. Sometimes domains that were totally banned spontaneously become free and clear. Any blogs hosted by Wordpress were blocked until this last week. Now, no problem. Same thing with Andrew Sullivan's blog, and half a dozen other sites. I think it's just to keep people guessing.

I think it could also be that whenever something pops up they don't like they review the entire site. If someone says 'Free Tibet!' on blogger and it gets too popular, they'll block the whole of blogger until they've got their targets down to specific blogs and pages, then they can unblock the entire thing.

IMO, if they're doing that, it's a very smart system of reducing dissent. I completely disagree with it, but then I grew up in a western country. I'm also not too ignorant to call China evil for doing so, they've made colossal strides in the past 50 years and perhaps in the long run this will be good for the country as a whole, potentially the worst thing that could happen is a civil war involving 1.3 billion people.

You've got to be kidding. Stifling another outlet for free speech is just to get a few more widgets produced per day right? Of course it has nothing to do with political fear, even though every other instance of such an action did. Right, you can't be serious.

It can't be both? The percieved benefits of protectionism, combined with the squelching of unsavoury opinions and other content must be very appealing.

I'm not sure that applies here. Protectionism is not about keeping people from goofing off at work.

doh, I missed the root comment (threading isn't very obvious in links).

Yes, I was kidding. I just didn't realize the ;-) on the end was necessary this time because it was such a ridiculous comment ;-)

Sorry. :) You wouldn't believe how many morons actually think like that when it comes to China though.

Now I realize I should have put the obligatory ;-) on the end, although I thought mentioning Facebook, Digg, and Reddit would have been enough :)