It’s not our fault

The government has finally broken its silence on the ongoing internet disruptions. In the fashion that one has come to expect of Pakistan’s authorities, this involved a mixture of deflecting the problem away from the state, blaming the people for the problem and the ever-present back-and-forth between different officials about which one of them is to be blamed for all those. It began with the IT minister claiming that VPN use was actually responsible for the internet slowdown. So, those people who have been using a VPN to access social media these past few months (which may well be everyone with internet access), it is actually all your fault. Then came the PTA chairman trotting out the oft-heard excuse of a disrupted undersea cable while briefing the National Assembly Standing Committee on IT. While this may be true for the past day or two, the internet disruptions and slowdowns have been going on for months, so a faulty cable cannot possibly be the only problem.

Notice how there is no mention of the firewall that, according to pretty much everybody outside the state, is actually causing the problem. The government is reportedly testing a firewall to filter out content before it gets on the internet but it is as if a memo went out that it does not exist. MQM-P lawmaker Amin Ul Haq apparently did not get the memo and asked if a firewall was installed or not. At this point, the PTA chairman pointed to the use of VPNs as the culprit. He then engaged in a back-and-forth with the PTI MNA and opposition leader Omar Ayub about whether the PTI had approved of the firewall during its stint in power or not. Like most of our policy debates, no one could tell with certainty who was right or wrong. Later the PTA chairman claimed that no firewall was being installed, rejected the use of the term altogether and said that it was actually a web management system that had been in place for a long time that was being upgraded. So is it this web management system upgrade that is the problem or the under-sea cable or the VPNs or all three?

Nothing resembling a solution to the problem seems to have come out of all these discussions. The digital firms that stand to lose an estimated $300 million to the slowdown, the online students whose classes have been disrupted, those who look for news on X (formerly Twitter) and even those trying to send or receive Whatsapp messages for work or maybe to just stay in touch with their loved ones are all still in limbo. The authorities are so busy deflecting blame that they appear to have forgotten that even if the slowdown is not their fault they still have to do something about it. Telling the court that the undersea cable will be fixed by the month’s end is not a solution as the problem predates this fault. And yet, when asked by committee members about the economic impact of the disruption, the reply by the PTA was that the telecom sector did not suffer much. Does the government really think that this is a telecom problem? Does it not know that the IT sector brings in $3 billion in exports and that this is not possible without fast, reliable internet? Did they not think about all the students at the virtual universities that have popped up throughout the country in recent years and how the internet issues are impacting their future? Then again, counting on a government so mistrustful of its people that it has to surveil all the content they might potentially post or see online to be somewhat responsive towards those same people’s problems is a bit optimistic. The people, like their content, are a problem to be managed, contained and monitored.