Pakistan Views

Pakistani officials said on Tuesday that worldwide problems with access to YouTube were an ‘unintentional’ side-effect of its decision to ban the website at home for religious reasons. But the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) said the site remained blocked at home, while it had also asked YouTube to remove “highly profane and sacrilegious footage” that was offensive to Islam. YouTube said on Monday that an Internet service provider complying with Pakistan’s ban on the website routed many worldwide users to nowhere for a couple of hours over the weekend. “This was not intentional and might have happened when an international company, which is routing Internet traffic to Pakistan, tried to block the specific URL (Uniform Resource Locator),” a senior PTA official told AFP. Officials say the video-sharing website was blocked because it carried cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH), which were republished by Danish newspapers earlier this month, and footage from a controversial Dutch film set to be released soon.
The ban was only partially effective, with industry officials saying that some Pakistani users were able to access YouTube through at least one major service provider that relies on a foreign-based router.
The authority would “ensure blocking of the website” at home until YouTube had complied with its request to remove the “objectionable” material, the PTA official said.
“We are right now in the process of checking it up with our technical experts whether the YouTube has removed the material from the site,” the official added.
YouTube was not immediately available for comment on whether the videos had been withdrawn.
But earlier it said it was working to ensure there could be no repeat of the worldwide problems sparked by Pakistan’s actions.
“For about two hours (Sunday), traffic to YouTube was routed according to erroneous Internet Protocols, and many users around the world could not access our site,” YouTube said in a written reply to an AFP inquiry.
“We have determined that the source of these events was a network in Pakistan. We are investigating and working with others in the Internet community to prevent this from happening again.”