ISLAMABAD: The government will continue to keep the YouTube blocked for an indefinite period as currently no technical solution is available which can block 100 percent objectionable contents on the social website. Therefore the government is not ready to take any risk by officially opening the social website without a foolproof mechanism in place.
Pakistan had blocked the access of YouTube on September 17, 2012 after a blasphemous videos surfaced on the video-sharing website. Currently, no legislations are in place to sort out the content to be blocked and by whom. The PTA has no legal rights to block any content or site. It works either on the directives of courts or the Inter Ministerial Committee headed by secretary Ministry of Information Technology.
The Supreme Court in Constitutional Petition No 104 of 2012 ordered blocking offending material on YouTube website or any other website. The government is making efforts to meet the compliance of the SC and YouTube would be opened after the court order, the official said.
Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has identified the URLs of obnoxious videos, flagged the links and passed on the same to Google Inc. All the videos flagged by PTA, were responded by Google with the warning message displayed on every video. In order to monitor blasphemous and pornographic material on the internet, PTA has established a Web Analysis Directorate. In addition, a Web Analysis Cell “WAC” has also been created to proactively monitor and identify blasphemous and pornographic contents.
The PTA has co-ordinate the deployment of a technical filtering solution at Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) and TWA, who are the bandwidth providers. After the blasphemous movie was uploaded on YouTube in September 2012, the Ministry of IT approached the management of Google and Facebook. In response, Google refused to block the blasphemous movie links/URLs in the absence of Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty. However, the management of Facebook agreed to block the secured website links. Due to bulk of blasphemous links/URLs and considering law & order situation in the country, the YouTube (www.youtube.com) at IP level was blocked on September 17, 2012 on the instructions of the Inter Ministerial Committee (IMC).