Local version of YouTube to be launched in Pakistan soon

According to the media reports, the member IT ministry Mudassar Hussain admitted that the objectionable material couldn’t be completely blocked, while addressing the demand of Senate standing committee to unblock Youtube at the earliest.

The world’s most popular video sharing site came under the radar of the Supreme Court when an Anti-Islam movie was uploaded on it and YouTube declined to remove it. Henceforth it was blocked by PTA in Pakistan. But the fact remains, most of the country is using VPN to access YouTube, thereby making this ban useless (Such a surge was seen in VPN usage that one of the VPN company hired a country manager for Pakistan).

Last year the ban was challenged in the Lahore high court and the court ordered the relevant officials to come up with suggestion to address the issue, but after many deliberations it was found that the only plausible way is to ask Youtube to launch a local version.

In a recent story, we told our readers that government is required to spend 3 Billion PKR to install the required filters to block all the blasphemous content from the platform, a report by Pakistan Telecommunication Authority suggests. And, Government doesn’t want to spend this much amount of money for this purpose.

The ministry claims that the company was reluctant until the Govt. issued legislation that would ensure the service providers will not be held responsible for the content uploaded by users, but the reservations have been addressed in the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Bill 2015.

Also recently the Google Asia Pacific representatives met the Govt. officials and they were asked to show local presence of Google in Pakistan, in light of increasing usage of 3g, 4g Internet.

Maybe we could get to see the local version of YouTube in the near future if these suggestions materialize into reality.

Source: Dawn, MoreMag