Pakistan’s YouTube ban and its worldwide impact!

Feb 28, 2008 World

Pakistan’s Telecommunications Authority’s (PTA) decision to block the access of YouTube in Pakistan has stirred the users of this website on Sunday as it caused disruption on the internet. Due to some technical mistake access to YouTube was lost for several hours all over the world.

After 2 days of blockage, PTA has lifted the ban on the access of the website after removal of the allegedly “blasphemous” movie clips from the Web site. Google, the owner of YouTube, confirmed service had been restored in Pakistan.

It was known that PTA has blocked the famous video sharing website to prevent the citizens to watch some offensive clips on the site. While doing so some technical mistakes were done and the outcome of which was a global blackout of the site for around 2 hours on Sunday. What happened was that packets sent to YouTube were flowing to Pakistan.

Reports said that the website was blocked as some of the content on the site was considered offensive to Islam including hosting Dutch cartoon’s to the trailer of a forthcoming movie.

There is along list of countries which blocked the site for some reasons. On the list, it’s now Pakistan’s turn to object the contents. There are some videos on the Prophet Cartoon story. So, it is considered by PTA that Pakistan youngsters shouldn’t be seeing anything like this on the video site. Though there are many wonderful videos are also available that can be informative.

Pakistan Telecom gave the order to the 70 ISP’s operating in the country. Multiple reports blame it on a mistake by an engineer at Pakistan telecom or a more vicious claim of IP hijacking by the Telco which created this blaster mistake.

Their technical mistake gives a clear indication that Pakistan is still far behind India to compete in IT sector. Do they need better software skills and improvement in their hi-tech knowledge? Sursh Rao, a 26 year old software engineer from Bangalore comments that they should outsource all their research to India and then they can have their nuclear weapons cheaper and faster.

Pervez Musharraf is in favor of this decision as Rashid Qureshi, the spokesman for him said, “We have every right to protect the ignorance of Pakistani people from the propaganda that is disseminated through low grade short clips on YouTube. This clip on YouTube poses the greatest threat to the current stability and peace of Pakistan. We would do anything to keep the peace: burn embassies, dissolve judiciary and parliament, and impose martial law”.

Most of the people are saying against the decision and said the action as unfair and against democracy. Using religious beliefs as a reason to block websites seems to be unacceptable by many people. Rahim Masood, a 24 year old student and a pro-democracy leader said, “If we are not allowed to see offensive material on YouTube, you tell me how we will know what to protest against? How will we decide which flag to burn? In this information age, access to offensive information is a must”. According to him YouTube is much informative then offensive and let them know what is right and what is wrong. He protested the action and denied to agree with the decision.

YouTube has a long history of being blocked. So many countries earlier also banned on this site and objected the content provided. Thailand and Turkey both are again seeking to block YouTube. Ban by Pakistan on the site is highlighted worldwide because blockage in Pakistan caused global break down of the site. It showed how easy it is to setup domain errors. What makes the internet so easy for people to use also makes it vulnerable for attacks. And it is likely that similar outages will happen in the future.

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Tags: Ban, Internet, Pakistan, Youtube