Pakistan Government officials have announced an Internet ban imposed on more than 450 websites that was set in place today, May 20th, 2010. The main reason cited by Islamabad officials was the deeply sacrilegious and derogatory material present on these sites.
Immediately after their filter was put into place, Pakistan Internet traffic went down by 25%. This is mainly due to the fact that the filter included big Internet destinations like Facebook, YouTube, Flickr or Wikipedia.
The Pakistani population was quick to react, but not as someone might have expected. After the ban was announced, protesters gathered on the streets of Karachi to support their Government's decision.
This is due, in fact, to the reason that started this whole debacle. All of these events began a couple of days ago, when someone formed a Facebook group called “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.”
The creator of that group wanted everyone to draw a caricature of the Muslim prophet Mohammed until May 20th, to show Islam believers that they were not afraid of extremists and their threats.
Because the Muslim faith considers drawing or depicting Mohammed as sacrilegious, when the Pakistani group Islamic Lawyers' Movement got wind of it, it immediately filed a petition with the Pakistani High Court to block Facebook before the “Draw Mohammed” competition would come to an end and people started showing their pictures.
Facebook hesitated in deleting or blocking access to the “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” group to Pakistan users, and the Government went forward with its plans. Despite all this, Muslim and non-Muslim believers created an “Anti-Draw Mohammed” Facebook group to support the filter and the right to have a religion's rules and believes respected.
The ban on Facebook was put into place on May 19th, and was followed the next day by the rest of the 450+ websites.
As for YouTube, the Google-owned website already went through this before, being temporarily banned in Pakistan in 2007. At the moment, both YouTube and Google are having discussions with the Islamabad Government to have their ban lifted under certain conditions.
According to several Pakistani users around the Internet, the filters can be bypassed easily using simple proxy servers.
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