The YouTube ban for U.S. soldiers worldwide announced earlier this week came at a puzzling time, said Hurley and co-founder Steve Chen, because the military had just recently launched its own YouTube channel. Hurley doubted that an increase in video could really affect the military's massive network.

Chen said YouTube was reaching out to the Pentagon, along with the other banned Web companies, to learn "what it's going to take to keep the YouTube site up." He said they were willing to work with the military to install controls on what type of content would be available.

Other sites covered by the ban include video-sharing sites Metacafe, IFilm, StupidVideos and FileCabi; social networking sites MySpace, BlackPlanet and Hi5; music sites Pandora, MTV, 1.fm and live365, and the photo-sharing site Photobucket.

The block does not affect the Internet cafes that soldiers in Iraq use that are not connected to the Defense Department's network.

In another part of the AP's interview (packaged as a separate story), Hurley and Chen talked about what they were working on to move YouTube ahead, saying that their video ad platform would be ready soon, as well as better systems for keeping copyrighted material off of the site.

Developing better methods of detecting protected material will pave the way for YouTube to work with copyright holders to negotiate more revenue-sharing agreements that include its vast community of users, Hurley said.

"We will be able to reduce the clutter of stuff that people don't even watch on our site," he said. "That will give us more opportunities to reward the people that are really creating great content for our system."