KARACHI, Feb 26: The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has sought to put a ban on 104 pornographic websites, apparently unaware of the fact there are millions of such websites on the Internet.
Well-placed sources told Dawn on Wednesday that recently the telecommunications headquarters in the capital had issued a directive to all its regional directors and leading Internet service providers to ensure that access to the 104 pornographic websites was blocked.
The PTA directive says: “It is intimated that showing any obscene material on the Internet is illegal, as it is against the existing Act and terms/conditions of the licence issued to ISPs. Any violation of the subject issue is a serious offence under the law.
“You are, therefore, directed to block access to all such sites leading to obscene pictures and porno material under intimation to PTA. List of porno sites is attached.
“Please educate your customers through email to protect their PCs against unauthorized access to the net, by installing available softwares, to enable the parents to stop child exposures to adult sites on the net.”
The list, obtained by Dawn, contains the universal resource locators — or, addresses of World Wide Web pages — of some well-known pornographic websites.
When contacted, the regional director of the PTA, Col Rizwan Haidery, argued that the telecoms regulator could actually block access to all pornographic websites available on the World Wide Web. “Those Internet service providers connected to the Pakistan Internet Exchange could be easily prevented from showing these websites. Those not connected with the Pakistan Internet Exchange would be made to do that.”
When the PTA director was informed that some technical experts maintained that blocking of websites would lead to bottlenecks on the Internet, he said he was not aware of this.
When it was pointed out to the PTA director that the list put out by the telecoms regulator did not contain the addresses of millions of pornographic websites, he asked this reporter to give the PTA a list of such other websites.
The secretary of the Internet Service Providers Association of Pakistan, V.A. Abidi, told Dawn that the PTA move would slow down the speed on the Internet. “Whenever a subscriber asks for an address, the network would first check whether it is a proscribed address or not. This would naturally take up a lot of time. As it is, the speed of the Internet is very slow in the country. There is no point in making it even slower.”
He added that it was pointless seeking to put a ban on pornographic websites, for subscribers were intelligent enough to decide on their own whether they should see such sites or not.
An owner of an Internet service provider told Dawn that the telecoms regulator was banning pornographic websites in order to divert attention from the ban on net-to-phone websites. He added that the PTCL wanted the webites allowing Internet telephony banned because they deprived the phone utility of some revenue.
