YouTube’s co-founders on Thursday challenged the Pentagon’s assertion that soldiers overseas were sapping too much bandwidth by watching online videos, the military’s principal reason for blocking YouTube and other popular Web sites from Defense Department computers.

“They said it might be a bandwidth issue, but they created the Internet, so I don’t know what the problem is,” said Chief Executive Chad Hurley. YouTube is trying to work with the Pentagon in hopes the military will reverse course or at least partially repeal the ban.

“We’d like to explore what’s at issue here and talk about what we can do to sort out what’s the issue here,” said YouTube spokeswoman Julie Supan.

The Pentagon said this week it was cutting off service members’ access to YouTube, MySpace and 11 other Web sites, some of which are used by soldiers on the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan to post videos and journals for friends and family back home.

via SeattlePI