In a written reply to a lawmaker’s query, the National Assembly was informed on Monday that the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) had carried out a search for objectionable material on the internet and blocked 31,819 such websites. But, the authority said, it was impossible to filter out all sites offering offensive material.
In background interviews, PTA officials said “the authority had repeatedly told the government that technically it was not possible to block offensive movies even if multi-million dollar filters were used.
“Although the PTA has banned YouTube, computer users can access it through unsecured sites,The best possible solution which other Muslim countries had put in place was an automatic warning which informed a viewer trying to watch such material about the nature of the content”, he said. Pakistan has also placed a similar warning on the internet.
In effect government has admitted that there is no technical way to block all objectionable content on the internet.
