Egypt Bans YouTube for One Month

Egypt banned for one month on Saturday the video-sharing site YouTube of a video offensive to the Prophet Mohammed.

A lower administrative court had ordered that the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology block YouTube, owned by Google, in 2013 over the video, but the case was appealed and its ruling stayed during the appeal process.

On Saturday, the court ruled the regulators must block the website over the denigrative video, a lawyer who filed the case told Reuters.

The ministry had in 2013 said it would be impossible to enforce the ruling without also disrupting Google’s Internet search engine, incurring potentially huge costs and job losses in the Arab world’s most populous country.

The film “Innocence of Muslims”, a low-budget 13-minute video, was billed as a film trailer and made in California with private funding. It provoked a wave of anti-American unrest in Egypt and other Muslim countries when it appeared in 2012.

Saturday’s ruling is considered file and cannot be appealed.