ET: For a journalist, perhaps nothing is a greater violation of human rights than the denial of access to information. In the case of Pakistan versus YouTube, I think the nine-month banon Google’s video-sharing website is really the limit of regressive and, in the eyes of any global citizen who accepts the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, unethical and illegal behaviour.
I hold out no hope from the new government in this case.
It is clear that in a country as fragmented along the lines of “haves” versus the “have-nots”, “extremists” versus “the rest”, the ban on YouTube and possibly all of Google, in the near future, is the pragmatic (read: easy) stance to take.
Placate dangerous, religion-intoxicated extremists like Mumtaz Qadri, who are able to act thanks to the high-level of extremism in the average Pakistani, and let the small number of middle class, upper-middle class and elite, who are blessed enough to have access to the internet, suffer. The latter is far less organised and far less likely to start gunning down people in the streets over internet censorship