Pakistan officially moves to ban India Today website

(India Today)


The Pakistan government is seeking ban on the India Today website within the country and has asked local internet service providers (ISPs) and services that distribute Indian content on web to block indiatoday.intoday.in. This comes just weeks after Pakistan tried to give out the impression that it cares for freedom of press and free speech after it withdrew a similar attempt to block the India Today site, just a day after the website had become inaccessible to majority of web users in the country.

The earlier ban, likely triggered by the India Today cover photo of Pakistan chief of army staff Raheel Sharif, came after a plea against the magazine was filed in a local court. But the current attempts to ban the Indian Today website seem more systematic with the Pakistan Telecom Authority, which is the nodal agency for blocking of websites in the country, spearheading the initiative.

For the last few months, and in the same manner the publication has done for years, India Today is highlighting the hypocrisy and double-talk of Pakistan when it comes to terrorism. Although it is not clear what led to the latest attempts by Pakistan to ban our website, it is possible that the government and Pakistan army, which doesn't like any criticism, is angry with India Today's latest cover on country.

Unlike in India, where the web traffic flows through several gateways, in Pakistan it is easier to block websites using block lists because almost all ISPs use Pakistan Internet Exchange. This makes it easier to filter websites using a blocked list. Freedom House, which publishes an annual report on the state of web censorship, has consistently labelled Pakistan as "Not Free". The Pakistan government also often asks web service providers like Google's YouTube or Amazon and CloudFlare, which run the content delivery networks, to restrict content or websites in the country.

Although earlier web service providers used to ignore or resist such demands, of late they have started complying with the local laws. While (in most cases) they don't stop serving the content, they do ensure that this content doesn't flow through their local - in this case Pakistani - servers and centres. A person familiar with the process said content delivery network providers, when they get a legitimate request from a government to block something, implement a custom map with the country requesting block removed from it. In case of India Today, the Pakistani users will still be able to access the site but content for that will be delivered using servers located outside Pakistan.

While Pakistan does better at blocking websites than India - the government here too tries to block content in a non-transparent manner - it lacks the sort of web blocking capabilities that its friend China has built. So even if Pakistan blocks the indiatoday.intoday.in, tech savvy web users will still able to access the website using:

-- Proxy servers, because they change the location of the IP address a user from something based in Pakistan to an IP that is located outside.

-- VPN: This creates a virtual private tunnel between a proxy server and the user. It is secure and private and in most cases can be easily used to bypass website blocking. Nowadays, Opera browser has an inbuilt VPN.

-- Tor browsers: These will do the same thing that proxy servers do but in a multi-layered way. Firefox has an easy-to-use Tor bundle, although speed while browsing the web is slow. 

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