ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has finally persuaded the US-based Pakistani company PKNIC to set up an office in Lahore.

The company owns Pakistan’s top-level internet domain ‘.pk’ (dot-pk) and has been managing the domain for about two decades, and numerous attempts were made in the past to bring .pk operations to Pakistan.

Sources said that although the PTA gives an impression that it owns the domain, the fact was that it had little or no control over it.

The PTA has described the setting up of the office by PKNIC in Lahore as a major achievement, but information gathered by Dawn suggests that the company will continue to control and manage the ‘top-level domain’ (TLD) or .pk.

The root server mirroring for .pk domain was fully operational in Pakistan, the sources said, adding that the server was successfully implemented and had been tested with all global root servers.

The PTA also claims to have had a long association with the transition project and says it had been working for successful transition of .pk domain to Pakistan.

The .pk domain has been owned and controlled from outside Pakistan for the last two decades, although important state organs, semi-government and private organisations and PTA are currently using the dot-pk domain server.

The US-based firm had attained the ownership rights from the Ministry of Science and Technology in the 90s said a source.

The issue agitated IT companies, which have long been expressing concerns about Pakistan’s strategic online information portal which is at risk of being blacked out.

‘This is a fact that Pakistan’s online portal is at risk, but the Ministry of Information Technology and telecom authorities do not have capacity to solve this issue,’ a top official of the IT ministry told Dawn.

When asked about national information security threats, the official said: ‘The technology infrastructure, like servers of the dot-pk domain is based and managed from the US. In case of bad relations, Pakistan may face an internet blackout.’

He said: ‘Unlike Pakistan that does not own dot-pk domain, Indian IT Ministry owns its dot-in domain level, and, similarly, the UK, the US, and China own .co.uk, .us, and .cn, respectively. And their data centres are also located in respective countries.’

Terming the dot-pk a national asset, PTA chairman Dr Mohammad Yaseen is optimistic that improvement in its services would boost local content development, subsequently encourage enterprises to host their web content under .pk and ensure smooth operations of an important internet resource.

A dedicated team at the ICT Directorate of the PTA is working on the project.