Why Jordanian businesses are blocking Facebook

1. Reduced productivity for employees

2. Oversaturation of the networking resources with non-business type of traffic. It's really sad if the CEO's important proposal email has to wait in the outbox queue waiting for some idiot to finish watching the last episode he missed on TV.

3. Availability of alternate means to access these sources. Most phones, and tablets these days have internet access and can access all of these services. So do it on your own network bandwidth type of deal

4. Fear of liability, companies are liable sometimes for what employees end up watching online. This forces them to waste work cycles to provide evidence and investigate incidents if the law agencies request it.

5. Some companies even ban sites that are completely harmless like Google books for example, purely on intellectual property concerns.

6. Others block places like Gmail and file sharing sites on fear of downloading any form of malware. Worse content like child-pornography can cause harm to the organization and the individuals.

I agree that the world has changed and access to "interactive" forms of communication like social networks is becoming a basic human right, but companies are running businesses for profit, that's enought justification for many of them.

The Jordanian private sector is just like any business around the world. They want to keep costs low, and sometimes the only way to do this is by delaying that much needed network upgrade till the last minute. With many running 10BaseT networks created over 10 years ago, and starting to decay and show how dated and slow it is. The only alternative that remains is to shape the usage patterns of the users and systems. Believe it or not, there's a scientefic background to this.