Political parties have more or less stuck to arbitrary regulation of the internet, whether in power or in the opposition
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uccessive governments in Pakistan have been striving to control traditional and social media through strict policies, including promulgation of laws, internet outages, disruptions, restrictions on VPN use and throttling of social media networks like X, Facebook and YouTube to counter, what they call ‘disinformation’ and ‘fake’ news. However, all such policies have largely failed to do so. The cost of this policy measure has, instead, resulted in major losses in the country’s internet and general economies.
The Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf, after it came into power, introduced several policies to control the media. The first such policy was to massively reduce the allocation for public advertisement for traditional media, providing media owners the excuse to layoff a large number of journalists and force salary cuts for those left behind. At the same time, several media outlets were forced to close down.
When the PTI government sensed that their first policy measure was not enough to stop the media from reporting on its poor governance, it proposed the formation of the Pakistan Media Development Authority, aiming to centralise the regulation of all media platforms, including print, electronic and digital platforms. The proposed plan faced strong opposition from journalists and media organisations, who feared that it was meant for increased censorship and suppression of dissent.
After failing in their PMDA plans, the PTI introduced social media regulations in early 2020, requiring social media companies to establish local offices and data servers in Pakistan.
The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz and the Pakistan Peoples Party, which appeared to be critical of these policies of the PTI continued with the same once they were in power. First, Pakistan suffered time to time internet outages, then X (formerly, Twitter) was banned followed by the installation of the so-called ‘firewall’. The final step in the saga was the VPN registration policy. These policies could do nothing to stop disinformation and fake news. Instead, these strengthened the impression that Pakistan was facing the worst kind of censorship. Another major negative outcome was financial losses to the internet economy.
Pakistan is among the top 10 countries in the world that have suffered financial losses because of outages and shutdowns of internet and social media apps. For Pakistan, Top10VPN.com tracked 18 instances of deliberate internet shutdown for three major reasons: elections, information control and street protests in 2024.
The report says, “These disruptions lasted 9,735 hours and impacted 82.9 million users.”
According to the estimate, the ongoing shutdown of social media platform X since February 18, 2024, was the costliest, with a total estimated impact of $1.34 billion.
The report further revealed that internet shutdowns in Balochistan between July 16 and August 21 during the Baloch Yakjehti Committee’s protests in Gwadar lasted for 864 hours, costing $11.8 million.
In the wake of internet shutdowns, the Pakistan Software Houses Association came out with strong criticism of the policy. Sajjad Mustafa Syed, the association’s chairman, said Pakistan’s information technology sector suffers losses of more than S1 million per hour on account of internet shutdown in the country. He said that 99 percent of the member firms had reported that their services were disrupted and 90 percent had reported losses. He said one call centre had been forced to pay a $2 million penalty because of the recent internet shutdown.
Even the PPP chairman, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, has slammed the slowdown and restriction of the internet across the country, describing these as an “attempt to control and censor” the populace.
“Key infrastructure used to be roads, highways and motorways,” he said while addressing the convocation ceremony at Sindh University in Jamshoro. “In today’s age, I believe it’s our bandwidth, our fibre optic cable, our wireless internet services.”
According to reports, the government has been installing the second phase of a “firewall” that monitors certain platforms and enables the blocking of specific content.
Bilawal Bhutto also criticised the government’s policy of registering VPNs, saying that his party had taken up the issue with the PML-N, with whom the PPP is in a coalition in the Centre.
The government’s vision of rapidly increasing IT exports is not well aligned with its IT policy. However, the government seems helpless in this matter. This may perhaps be because while most coalition partners of the PML-N are raising concerns against internet outages, VPN policy, closure of X and installation of the supposed firewall, the IT Ministry continues to follow and advocate the same policy – a policy, which apparently, it has not formulated.
The author is a senior journalist, teacher of journalism, writer and analyst. He tweets at @BukhariMubasher