I surely hope that the DoD is taken to task and forced to reverse themselves on this decision.

First, it's just not possible or feasible to control information and access like this anymore.

YouTube blocked? Simply go to a site like http://youtubeproxy.org and put in the URL of the video you want. If they block that site, use one of the other 5000+ proxy servers available from www.proxy.org.

It's not that hard to figure out and what truly frightens me is that the people IN CHARGE of our networks do not understand how easy it is to bypass their restrictions.

Second, to our current generation of soldiers this is akin to banning letter writing. It is THE WAY they communicate and it's not fair to them, or their family members, to remove access to these sites.

There are articles coming out today stating that executives at the various blocked sites were never contacted by the DoD regarding this action. Perhaps they could have been consulted to come up with mechanisms to limit the bandwidth usage?

For example: All of the access coming from Iraq and Afghanistan will be associated with a distinct range of IP addresses. On the server side (at YouTube, MySpace, etc) they could examine the IP address of the requesting client and offer a lower bandwidth alternative. This is NOT hard to do. Furthermore, if the choice were to have their site entirely blocked or to provice limited access, the content providers would most likely cooperate to make it work.

There are other, more serious, implications to these bans. For instance, the 2008 Presidential season is heating up and many of the candidates have an online presence. As YouTube is now the de facto standard for video sharing, the candidates are posting videos there and linking to them from their campaign sites. The current decision is now restricting the ability for tens of thousands of deployed soldiers, airmen, marines and DoD civilians to remain engaged and informed on the political debate.

Some DoD installations have also blocked eBay. However, there are other, less well known, auction sites that are not blocked. I'm not a lawyer, but it seems that eBay would have a good case against the government for prejudicial treatment. Many of the other sites could have as well. Live365.com (a streaming audio site) is blocked but dozens of other streaming audio sites are not. Could the owners of Live365.com not have a case that the capricious blocking of their site adversely affects their business?