The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has directed that the country's ISPs to block access to the videos sharing website YouTube for allegedly featuring a blasphemous video.

However, and according to the Pakistani “Don't Block The Blog” there are two theories that could explain PTA's recent move to ban YouTube: vote rigging videos showing alleged evidence of election fraud in Karachi and a supposedly blasphemous video disgracing Prophet Mohammed.

The authority did not specify what the offensive material was, but a PTA official said the ban concerned a movie trailer for an upcoming film by Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders, who has said he plans to release an anti-Koran movie portraying the religion as fascist and prone to inciting violence against women and homosexuals.

If you happened to be searching for a video at YouTube.com Sunday afternoon, there's a good chance your browser told you it was unable to locate the entire Web site. Turns out, much of the world was blocked from getting to YouTube for part of the weekend due to a censorship order passed by the government of Pakistan, which was apparently upset that YouTube refused to remove digital images many consider blasphemous to Islam.

According to wire reports, Pakistan ordered all in-country Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to YouTube.com, complaining that the site contained controversial sketches of the Prophet Mohammed which were republished by Danish newspapers earlier this month. The people running the country's ISPs obliged, but evidently someone at Pakistan Telecom - the primary upstream provider for most of the ISPs in Pakistan - forgot to flip the switch that prevented those blocking instructions from propagating out to the rest of the Internet.

So, what happened? From everything I've read and heard, the YouTube situation appears to have been due to an innocent, if inept, mix-up, which allowed Pakistan's ISPs to effectively announce to the world that its Internet addresses were the authoritative home of YouTube.com, and for about an hour or so, most of the rest of the world's ISPs incorporated those updated directions as gospel.

In a country where the government more or less can tell resident ISPs what to do, blocking citizens from visiting certain sites is simple: The ISPs simply tell their customers that if they're looking for a censored site, they either receive an empty page or are redirected to wherever the ISP or government deems as an appropriate substitute destination.

Some experts are crying foul, saying this was an deliberate act of defiance or assertiveness by the nascent Pakistani government. But most seem to agree this was little more than a screw-up. Still, a nation state or other adversary could stir up diplomatic trouble by toying with this sort of trust built into the Internet. What would our government make of it, say, if all of a sudden all traffic destined for .gov domains wound up in China or North Korea?

Marc Sachs, director of the SANS Internet Storm Center said for now the checks and balances in the system today are that the same trust that allows network providers to abuse the system can be revoked. In this latest case with Youtube, network operators affected by the bogus update simply discarded the errant directions from Pakistan and in all likelihood told their own routers to ignore any further updates from Pakistan, at least for the time being, Sachs said.

Pakistan's telecommunications regulator said that it had lifted restrictions imposed on YouTube over an anti-Islamic video clip, but rejected blame for a cut in access to the Web site in many countries over the weekend.

The authority told Pakistani Internet service providers to restore access to the site on Tuesday afternoon after the removal of a video featuring a Dutch lawmaker who has said he plans to release a movie portraying Islam as fascist and prone to inciting violence against women and homosexuals.

Officials here have described the YouTube clip as "very blasphemous" and warned that it could fan religious fanaticism and hatred of the West in Pakistan, where the government already faces a growing Islamic insurgency.

Geert Wilders, said his film criticizing the Quran will be completed this week and criticized Pakistan for its moves to block the clip: It's far from a true democracy. A real democracy must be able to bear some criticism.