ISLAMABAD: Pakistan restored access to popular video website YouTube, but Facebook and 1,200 web pages remained blocked on Thursday as a row about “blasphemous” content on the Internet rumbled into a second week.

YouTube, which is Google-owned, had said it was working to ensure the service was restored, although Google chief executive Eric Schmidt suspected that suppressing political criticism had been a factor behind the ban.

But late on Wednesday, the regulatory authority in Pakistan said that YouTube – which together with Facebook accounts for up to 25 percent of Internet traffic in the country – was back up, although restricted.

“YouTube has been unblocked, but the links to sacrilegious content would remain inaccessible in Pakistan,” PTA spokesman Khurram Mehran told AFP. “There are around 1,200 URLs which have been blocked. Only links containing objectionable material have been blocked,” he added.

A spokesman for the Internet Service Providers Association said that about 550 pages on YouTube were still blocked. “The total (number of URLs restricted) is about 1,200,” Wahaj-us-Siraj said. “Out of those, there are about 550 URLs from YouTube only,” he said.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik said pages containing blasphemous material would remain blocked but that Facebook and YouTube would be back up in days. The controversy failed to incite a mass outpouring in Pakistan, where there are an estimated 2.5 million Facebook users, and demonstrations have not spread to other Muslim countries. Facebook expressed disappointment at being blocked and the offending page disappeared from the social networking service on Friday.
Source: The News
Date:5/28/2010