THIS refers to the ban on YouTube by the PTA on the advice of the government.

Even though violence after the release of the blasphemous video on YouTube is condemnable, it must be realised that the ban on YouTube has adverse effects on students.

I use YouTube for my MBA studies. Not-for-profit academic web sites also use YouTube as a backend platform. As a result of this ban in Pakistan, such informative and academic videos are not available to aspirants of higher education as well.

By banning YouTube, we are effectively prohibiting spread of knowledge and information. By keeping such material from the people, what are we going to gain? If the objective is for the hate speech to cease, that won’t happen. Pakistan simply doesn’t figure as big enough to worry about in the equation for giants such as Google and the various stakeholders.

We are not China or India in terms of technological growth, so we must act smart, not stupid.

By banning YouTube, the subsequent inability for Pakistanis to access academic material is a gross injustice to the core injunctions of Islam itself, the essence of which may be summarised by ‘Iqra’.

It may be mentioned here that being an IT engineer, who is familiar with how networks work, I am able to circumvent and bypass these filters very easily.

It is trivial to do so. Yet, I prefer to request the authorities to lift the ban on YouTube so that everybody is able to benefit from this electronic library.

RAFAY BIN ALI Karachi