It is true that one hosts a website in order to profit from it in whatever capacity. As such, it comes a shocking blow to know that as of 2008, officials in Thailand have blocked viewership to over 2300 websites to locals.  The major reason cited for such mass blockage is security and defamation of the government.

This becomes important keeping in mind that the political scenario in Thailand is not too stable and anything that’s cited against the king isn’t taken too well. Sites banned also include pornographic sites. The strange part of this analysis is the 90% of these sites are hosted overseas which means that international website owners stand to suffer. What may be viewed as acceptable and informational content elsewhere in the word is a taboo in Thailand?

Banned sites include those containing cartoons, articles, blogs and even YouTube videos. Thailand isn’t the first country to be practicing such large scale banning and this is popularly carried out in China too. In fact China tops the list in terms of stringency but news of banned sites elsewhere will influence website owners to review their content so as to not face the ire of threatened governments across the globe.

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Tags: articles, banning, blogs, cartoons, china, defamation, globe, government, hosted, political, pornographic, Security, sites, Thailand, websites, YouTube videos

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 9:35 pm and is filed under Keywords, SEO Knowledge, Social News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.