Karachi: National internet filtering and blocking system has planned to be developed in Pakistan for undesired, indecent and blasphemous content on the internet.
ICT R&D Funds has sought a mechanism from the private companies in order to block and filter online material at the end of IP backbone in order to making all undesired and restricted sites inaccessible and unreachable by internet users.
Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) blocked 13,000 website having adult content whereas it also blocked thousands of websites with blasphemous content on religion.
However, the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and backbone providers have currently deployed manual URL filtering and blocking mechanism in order to block the specific URLs containing undesirable content as notified by PTA from time to time.
The internet access in Pakistan is mostly unrestricted and unfiltered and it traffic come from two IP backbone providers, i.e., PTCL and TWA.
Many countries such as KSA, UAE and China have deployed web filtering and blocking systems at the Internet backbones within their countries. However, Pakistani ISPs and backbone providers have expressed their inability to block millions of undesirable web sites using current manual blocking systems.
ICT R&D Fund has decided to fund the indigenous development, deployment, operations and maintenance of such a system by companies, vendors, academia or research organizations with proven track record.
This system would be indigenously developed within Pakistan and deployed at IP backbones in major cities, i.e., Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad. Any other city/POP could be added in future. The system is proposed to be centrally managed by a small and efficient team stationed at POPs of backbone providers.
The system would have a central database of undesirable URLs that would be loaded on the distributed hardware boxes at each POP and updated on daily basis. The database would be regularly updated through subscription to an international reputed company maintaining and updating such databases.
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