Pakistan has recently had a bit of a love hate relationship with the internet and companies that provide internet services. First Pakistan had banned Facebook over a controversy and then also ended up putting the clamps on Twitter, YouTube and Wikipedia.
Most people think bans do not serve any purpose as in today’s time the internet is very symbiotic and content is not always URL specific. It is usually shared across various mediums which might end up making the ban pretty ineffective.
According to a report in Times of India, a Bhawalpur bench of Lahore High Court ordered Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, Amazon, YouTube and Bing to be blocked or banned on a petition against these websites that they were publishing sacrilegious material.
The Pakistani authorities have not carried out the court order suggesting it has not received the orders but heard about it through media reports.
Hopefully these websites will not be blocked in Pakistan as such objectionable material is often unnoticed until its banned or a issue is raised. This I guess is probably counter productive.
Do you think these bans really serve any purpose? Can the internet be regulated? Do let us know through your comments.
Link: Times of India
4 Comments
Foolish government, i bet they dont know Google, facebook, yahoo etc more than their names. Most of the people in court are technology illiterate. Someone just told them that “sacrilegious content can be viewed using these sites” (skipping that “until you search for it”), if they are going to ban, they should block all adult sites.
This is pretty going to end up like what had happened a couple of months back when it was Google and China in the media.
Now it’s Pakistan and social-networks. Internet has got no limits, everyone needs to understand that. Blocking a few sites will just destroy the people’s hope to see the news from one place, rather than prevent. I agree to what is said in the post that content gets multiplied, so people will get the news from somewhere else. Whatever be the case, it’s just that what’s happening is wrong.
btw recently Pakistan unblocked Facebook đŸ˜›
i woul like to know more about all what happen around there please