Editorial

Get sensible

The YouTube ban has become a travesty, and other nations snigger behind their hands at silly little Pakistan.

Editorial April 22, 2014

With around 30 million individual internet connections in Pakistan and growing fast, it was never going to be easy to block access completely — short of shutting down the internet altogether in Pakistan. PHOTO: AFP/FILE

One can only welcome the remarks made by members of a Senate committee on April 21, where they unanimously asked the government to reopen YouTube. The world’s leading video-sharing website has been blocked in Pakistan for 582 days so far and now there seems to be a glimmer of hope that perhaps, the end to the ban may be in sight. Millions of netizens have found ways around the YouTube ban by using proxy servers, some of which have themselves been blocked from being downloaded — only to be reprogrammed in order to avoid being blocked in Pakistan. With around 30 million individual internet connections in Pakistan and growing fast, it was never going to be easy to block access completely — short of shutting down the internet altogether in Pakistan. The YouTube ban has become a travesty, and other nations snigger behind their hands at silly little Pakistan. Again.

Once again we appear to be on the brink of an outbreak of commonsense in this matter. In that sense, what the Functional Committee on Human Rights in the Senate said on April 21 needs to be followed through. Senator Mushahid Hussain Syed told the committee that even countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE had not blocked access to YouTube.

The chairperson of the Senate committee said that even the head of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority himself believes that the ban was not useful and widely circumvented. The YouTube ban has become nothing more than a monumental embarrassment, an exercise in myopia and small-mindedness that panders to the lowest common denominator. Whatever point was being made in September 2011 when the ban was imposed amid a welter of violence and destruction — is long lost. The internet is a powerful resource for commerce and learning in Pakistan, and yet the government persists in denying access to a universal learning tool — YouTube — at who knows what cost to the current generation of students. Stop this nonsense. Now.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 23^rd, 2014.

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