ISLAMABAD:
It was blasphemous content that had pushed the authorities into banning video-sharing website YouTube in the country 16 months ago and in all that time the ground situation hasn’t changed a bit.
“The legal environment is not conducive for adopting a localised version of YouTube and unless and until a localised domain is obtained, it is not possible to stop blasphemous materials on the social website in Pakistan completely,” said representative of Google Inc, Mike Orgill while briefing the Senate sub-committee on information technology on Thursday.
When the Minister of State for IT Anusha Rehman inquired about the next step of Google after the government’s assurance of giving legal protection, the representative did not give any time frame but instead said that the company will see whether it was “financially and technically viable.”
Responding to queries of the committee, which met with Senator Osman Saifullah in the chair, Anusha said that a three-member committee headed by PTA chairman has been formed to analyse how the website was being operated by other Muslim countries.
The committee had asked whether it is possible to access YouTube in countries with large Muslim populations such as Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Malaysia and Turkey. In addition, the committee had also asked why the government had not used or replicated the system and safeguards employed by other Muslim states.
The committee, according to Rehman, discovered that 13 out of 14 countries it studied had localised YouTube. Furthermore, all these countries have installed filters for blocking blasphemous materials on the internet, she added.
Filters alone cannot block out blasphemous materials on the social website in the country, PTA chairman Dr Syed Ismail Shah told the committee.
During the meeting the role of the inter-ministerial committee -- the body that ordered the blocking of the site -- also came under discussion and speakers underlined the need for transparency in its affairs. The committee asked PTA to identify links of the objectionable video to Google on which the latter would issue warning tabs which would be globally visible.
Separately, the minister also informed the committee that the proposed Cyber Crime bill has been finalised and will be sent to the law ministry for vetting during the next week. It is likely to be tabled in parliament by the end of this month.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 10th, 2014.
COMMENTS (11)
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google sucks!!!... microsoft should ban google ... hmm
Hmm, quite honestly, me and a lot of others just want YouTube music vids plus internet porns back.
We are adults and quite capable of deciding what we want to watch and what we don't want to watch.
It's time for the rest of Pakistan to grow too.
Politicians will have their own agenda, their own shame to hide and their own vote bank to pander to. It's a shame that big parties rely on uneducated masses whose passions can be easily inflamed.
why pakistan need localized domain of youtube? the answer is simple. Because government want to moderate youtube to use it for their own benefits. All the videos which will be problematic for government will be blocked by them on localized domain so that no one can say a word against them. but the government didn't know that these videos will still be available from outside pakistan. so there is no use of blocking videos locally because anyone with basic internet knowledge will still be able to access .com version of youtube
Pakistan's laws are backward. They expect Google to manually police each and every piece of user submitted content at the time of submission. Something like how express news' comment section is moderated. But that is not how websites work outside of Pakistan. Outside of Pakistan content moderation is reactive not proactive. Moderators only take action when specific content is flagged and brought to their attention not for each and every piece of content at the time of submission. The latter is actually not even possible given the scale at which youtube operates and anyway Google does not like to do things manually. They automate to the hilt because that is where their strengths lie - in putting computers to work.
Once upon a time, there was Youtube...
Freedom of a man does not lie in the fact that he can do what he wants, but rather he is not compelled to do what he does not want.............Jean Jacques Rousseau.
The one and only reason for these so called politicians and defenders of faith and morals to unanimously block Youtube is because they don;t want easy viewing of all that is wrong with them and their endless corruption. They have a hard enough time controlling the media plus social media and then vids of phones etc.
@LalaGhee: not running towards.. it is indeed in stone age right now. May GOD help us
Pakistan seems to be running towards stone age.
Trust me, it is absolutely nothing to do with blasphemous content anymore, it is the content against our political leadership which has kept blocking Youtube.