You got it right that the Internet works on trust, and potential censors are likely to get their bite of the censorship apple.

But only once. Trust can be revoked at a highly granular level.

The architecture of the net is reasonably well equipped to deal with routing censorship from a rogue host (or rogue country).

It is sort of cool to watch the architecture initially designed 30+ ago by really freaking smart geeks interact with all of the other social and technical forces in the world.

If it keeps the monkeytards from rioting and burning down the palace? Just look at it like fire insurance.

considering that last night the CBS signal was "lost" in Alabama, oddly enough just during the 9 minutes of the Don Siegelman story on 60 Minutes. A message came on indicating the problem was out of New York which was obviously not true, and I've read reports that a strange political ad claiming that local Democrats were soft on terror came on air.

Alabakistan?

Forgive my outburst but the internet worked just fine, thank you very much. That there was all this crucial information in one vital location is what was exposed to vulnerability of the Pakistani censors.

In other words, the model of decentralization and buoyancy of data "able to survive a nuclear war" is working. But YouTube isn't the internet.

It's a web site (yes yes servers and all that but it's still one unified service entity in the wider net) which is a single point of failure, a hidden fortress, a single Norad of user data. It is not decentralized and impervious and it suffers the same weaknesses the "internet was designed to circumvent."

The eeeevul western media for poisoning young impressionable Muslim minds with content designed to incite riot. You'd go so far as to call it a conspiracy to do just that.

Back in the old days, when shortwave radio was the only form of long distance communication, offended governments blocked broadcasts from Voice of America, the BBC and others with obnoxious jamming stations that obliterated the broadcast signal with noise. Although the jamming was meant only to keep their own folks from hearing the "illicit" broadcasts, radio waves do not recognize international boundaries. Thus, the jamming signal would cause reception problems in neighboring countries as well.

Enter the Internet. Now, with the push of a button, an offended government can do the same thing with much less overhead. Shortwave transmitters are large, clunky, require complicated antennae arrays, and are generally expensive to maintain. But just about anyone can get a server and some engineer to run it. The times have indeed changed.