Thailand Bans YouTube

An anonymous reader writes "The new government of Thailand that forced its way into power last year has banned the website YouTube after a 44 second clip was found of someone spray painting on a picture of Thailand's king. When Google refused to remove the 'offending' clip the website was redirected to a different page. This comes days after a Swiss man was jailed 10 years for spray painting on pictures of the king while drunk, and is the same government that earlier this year slammed open source software for being useless and buggy."

Comments

You Tube is a fad which will expire eventually

[The Media Mechanic]

I'm going to take a slightly higher vantage point and just comment on the You Tube phenomenon. I find it hard to understand the whole fascination with You Tube. It seems to me that putting video on the Internet has been around a whole lot longer than You Tube. Previously all you had to do was put an MPEG file on your web server and hyperlink to it. Sure, you had to have an MPG viewer client application installed on your system, and it wouldn't open inside of the same browser window as the page you were on. You Tube solved those 2 "problems", but I wonder if that is such a quantum leap improvement in technology ? It seems more like a simple convenience to me... In other words, I don't see how You Tube is so different or amazing from any other web site / web page. Certainly I don't feel it is worth 16 Billion dollars or whatever Google paid for it.... I mean they certainly haven't made any money off of me. I have probably watched dozens of different videos and never looked at or clicked on a single advertisement. Of course this is only my opinion... Not intended to be inflammatory or a troll. So my question is... what does You Tube do so differently, that makes it worth so much in the eyes of Wall Street investors ??