ISLAMABAD: In an attempt to comply with the Supreme Court order of filtering certain websites containing blasphemous content “at all costs”, the Pakistan Telecommunication has blocked access to thousands of vital websites and email servers.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) passed on the same orders to the PTCL for action and denial of access to such derogatory websites.mWhile the PTA directions are binding on a service provider, the implementation details are left to the PTCL management, which went for an overkill by blindly blocking the Internet Protocol addresses en bloc instead of filtering the content on questionable websites.
The PTCL starting blocking Internet Protocols at its key gateway—ITI Karachi—(technically termed Router) which handles 95 per cent or more of Pakistan’s Internet traffic passes. The Internet-users have been facing problems intermittently in accessing websites of CNN, BBC, Yahoo, Microsoft, download.com, Symantecs, etc.
In other words, the PTCL has blocked some sites of www.akamai.net at their Karachi gateway exchange. Akamai.net has hundreds of servers, hosted across the globe, to provide content to a myriad of websites.
“If you visit a website that pulls its content from Akamai servers, the page will not display properly in the browser, thanks to the incumbent … CNN, BBC, Yahoo, Microsoft, download.com, Symantecs are hosted at multiple servers, but whenever they are accessed through Akamai.net automatically, the user finds it blocked,” said a leading cyber security expert.
The Internet Service Providers (ISP), under pressure from the subscribers, had a nightmarish day owing to the amounts of complaints registered with them. “Every single ISP that is connected to the Internet through ITI suffers, and the ISPs get to be blamed for PTCL’s dirty job,” said a senior official of the Internet Service Providers Association of Pakistan.
Requesting anonymity, a PTCL official explained to The News that the type of filtering, suited to the SC order, requires a proper infrastructure wherein the service provider can carry out deep packet inspection and then decide what to do with the traffic—block it or let it pass, but PTCL lacks such type of capability.”
The ISPs said they were experiencing packet loss and delay problems in one of the uplink circuits of our backbone services provider ITI. According to sources, the problem has been partially resolved by the PTCL staff but still some of the websites are opening up but their contents are displayed partially.
“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,” said an ISP in its regret letter to subscribers. The PTCL media team could not return to The News with the company despite promises.
