Dr Awab Alvi, co-founder of the online ‘Don’t Block The Blog‘ campaign in Pakistan had said that the recent ban put into practice on blogs hosted on Blogger has been lifted for about a week. For your info, the ‘Don’t Block The Blog’ campaign was started on march 3, 2006 to prop up free speech of Pakistani bloggers and internet free speech in general. It was started as an answer to the blanket ban on the Blogspot.com blogging platform establishmed by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA).
The issue cropped up when the Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) hunked access not to thousands of websites and email servers, including Google.com, Download.com, Microsoft.com, Gmail.com, Yahoo.com, BBC, CNN, Systematic, Akamai, PC World, MTV, Best Buy, Logitech and ESPN.
Many bloggers protested against the ban and Pakistani newspaper also covered the issue of blockage of servers and sites.
Pakistani ISP commented on the sudden blocking of the sites:
The sites, like Microsoft, Yahoo etc, pull their content from different servers distributed across different networks. Few of these networks have been blocked by ITI on the PTA directive ... The reason is that these networks are also hosting some information which is objectionable, but instead of blocking that particular web site, PTCL has blocked the whole networks, which is causing serious issues in display of Internet content.
The Pakistani ISPs, and IT-dependent businesses are said to have suffered 0 to 30 per cent revenue loss within the 5 days of block. It affected the web browsing and blogging badly.
Well, Dr Awab Alvi has said that the unblocking is just ‘accidental’ and the ban could be imposed shortly.
Via: Globalvoicesonline
