After Facebook, Pak Blocks ‘YouTube’ Now
After banning ‘Facebook’, Pakistani government has now blocked the popular video sharing website ‘YouTube’ for hosting what it called blasphemous material, said media reports.
Releasing a statement, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) said that ‘YouTube’ had been blocked due to ‘objectionable content’, though not specifying the nature of the content, reports said.
PTA directed all internet service providers today to block YouTube and so all internet users were unable to access the site after 11:00 am, said reports.
On condition of anonymity, a PTA official said that action was taken after the PTA authorities decided that some sacrilegious caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad were transferred from Facebook to YouTube, reports said.
Wahaj-us-Siraj, the CEO of Nayatel, an Internet service provider, said the blocking of the two websites would cut up to 25 percent of total Internet traffic in Pakistan, said reports.
“It’ll have an impact on the overall Internet traffic as they eat up 20 to 25 percent of the country’s total 65 giga-bytes traffic,” he was quoted as saying.
The move comes after the Lahore High Court’s order to block Facebook for an indefinite period as it acted on a petition filed by the Islamic Lawyers Forum, which had sought a complete ban on the social networking website.
(Based on internet reports)
