Telecom News Bulletin

The recent decision of Lahore High Court Bahawalpur Bench has opened a can of worms and left government in sixes and sevens. The court ordered to ban 12 websites and search engines which are of extreme importance to students, researchers, lawyers, think tanks, doctors, engineers, architectures and a host of people hailing from other professions. While no one disagrees that sacrilegious material must not be available on the internet, the way the sweeping orders have been issued to ban search engines like MSN, Google and Yahoo caused a wave of resentment which cuts across every field. A startling fact was revealed in the TV program that the senior most judges on principal seat Lahore has already decreed that in case of any offensive material the links would only be blocked and not the entire website or search engines. Now this is mind boggling why a junior judge sitting in Bahawalpur, who is not even confirmed as yet issued a verdict contradictory to his superior at principal seat.

Moeed Pirzada conducted a program on the aforementioned topic. Panelists included Senator Ibrahim of JI, Abdul Sattar lawyer and Ansar Abbasi who has still not called his dogs off. Mentioned below are the main points of the program,

Summary:

• Can we constitutionally closed down the Information Super Highway
• Do we want to become Chad, Somalia or Sudan or follow Dubai, Qatar and Malaysia?
• Barring the continent of Africa only, Pakistan has lowest Internet penetration in the entire world which is 10 percent. The average Asian penetration is 22-23 percent while world aggregate is 26 percent in this regard.
• The already fragile economy will shatter altogether in the context of this decision.
• Judge of the court probably had not been assisted properly. This is intriguing as to why Deputy Attorney General favored the petitioner.
• Article 19 A of the constitution stops any legislation which hampers the right of freedom of information and expression.
• Deputy Attorney General was not authorized to say something on the issue without seeking the consent of the concerned ministry.
• PTA has already blocked 11,000 links in the backdrop of Facebook fiasco.
• There are 25 billion web pages and more than 110 million websites on the Information Highway
• Incase of any objectionable material, PTA has an elaborate mechanism to block that link but due to lack of publicity general public is not aware of the facility.
• PTA has a toll free number and an e-mail address for lodging any complaint about objectionable cyber content.
• Seeking any sacrilegious material on internet is a deliberate effort as one has to type for “Sacrilegious Material on Islam” or something like that. Why a true Muslim would do that in first place.

Analysis:

Problems are bound to create when any institution over steps its authority. Now a junior judge sitting in Bahawalpur has no business to issue a verdict in naked disregard of his superior judge. The senior most judge of Lahore High Court had already issued the judgment that in such cases only links and not the websites will be blocked. Why then such judgment came out from Bahawalpur is beyond any logic.

For Further Details See Dunya Today 24th June, 2010 Below: