From Mashable:
The Military ban of YouTube and twelve other sites including MySpace, Metacafe, MTV, Pandora, Photobucket, and Blackplanet has caused quite a stir in the press, in the military and with the banned social networks themselves. YouTube now wants to meet with Pentagon officials in order to convince them to reverse their decision to block its site for use from troops that use the Defense Department’s computer network.
The Military has insisted that for security purposes as well s the necessity to boost network efficiency, the heavy bandwidth sites must be blocked from use, though the ban bars no reflection on how the military regards such social networks as YouTube and MySpace. The biggest point of discussion regarding the ban was the ironic fact that the military is quick to leverage such networks for their own marketing purposes while insisting that their own troops cannot access these sites. Equally important is the fact that some sites on the banned list, especially Blackplanet, are small in comparison to YouTube, and do not take up nearly as many resources from the Defense Department’s network. Ben Sun, CEO of Community Connect, which operates Blackplanet, is seeking a reversal by the Pentagon for this reason.
Whether or not officials from the Pentagon have agreed to meet with YouTube or BlackPlanet is yet to be seen, but it does leave us all scratching our heads as to the real reasons for banning the sites in the first place.
You’re really banging away on this topic. I really think the Army’s position is more reasonable than you are giving credit for.
I think it would be reasonable to provision commercial internet for the troops in the same way that they have always provided commercial phone access for deployed soldiers; but to say that “morale oriented” access to the commercial internet has to be provided on networks deployed for C2, logistics, and related mission critical processes seems unreasonable given the reality of their current bandwidth constraints.
I’ve worked in IT for the USAF for the last 12 years and I can understand the argument to conserve bandwidth for mission readiness. In my experience DoD intranets are notoriously slow and it has always been a network perimeter battle – what to allow to traverse your network.
BUT, I’m not 100% sold that this is the angle DoD is taking. It would seem that if this was the actual concern then they would ask to block certain “streaming” protocols and file types instead and allow them from only .MIL and .GOV domains. They have done that in the past. At least in the Air Force…