What the regulator told the court
In a reply filed in the Islamabad High Court and reported on 2 October 2026, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) said that no law currently bans social media use by children under 16. It also said it cannot build an age-verification system beyond the law and the powers it has been given. The PTA described its content-blocking authority as 'limited and temporary in nature' and asked for a new legal and policy framework. It asked the court to dismiss the parts of the petition that go beyond its jurisdiction (APP report of the PTA reply).
I could not find a hearing date. The case is one of several petitions asking the court to compel federal agencies to regulate children's access to social media.
The strongest case for the petitioners
The petitioners' concern is serious and should not be dismissed. Children face grooming, sextortion, self-harm content and compulsive-use design. Voluntary platform controls have been uneven. Australia, which restricts under-16 accounts, and several other jurisdictions are debating similar rules. Pakistan currently sits in the 'under discussion' group in comparisons of national under-16 proposals. A state that does nothing while harms accumulate is making a policy choice too, and a court asking agencies what they are doing is a legitimate way to force an answer.
What the PTA's own numbers show
The PTA reported reviewing 1.789 million illegal links and blocking 1.577 million of them, an 88.2% rate. On X the rate was only 48.4% (APP). The regulator also said that HTTPS encryption makes blocking individual pieces of content impossible. That leaves the authority with a choice between blocking an entire site and doing nothing.
This is the engineering reality behind Pakistan's recurring shutdown and platform-block episodes, and it explains why the PTA calls its powers temporary. A tool that can only block whole domains does not work as a child-safety instrument. It cuts off adults, businesses and students along with the content at issue. It also pushes users toward VPNs, which makes the unwanted content harder to see and harder to police.
The regulator is therefore reporting a bad mandate, not asking for more power. The lawmakers who gave it that mandate should read the filing carefully.
An authority that does not yet exist
The Prevention of Electronic Crimes (Amendment) Act 2025 received presidential assent on 29 January 2025, according to a Pakistani law-firm summary (Legal 500 summary). It created a Social Media Protection and Regulatory Authority (SMPRA) to oversee platforms and remove content judged harmful, offensive or against the 'ideology of Pakistan.' It also created a Social Media Protection Tribunal, made spreading false information punishable by up to three years in prison or a fine of up to PKR 2 million, and replaced the FIA's cybercrime wing with a National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (ARY News key points). The consolidated text of the Act is available through the Sindh Judicial Academy's compilation of Pakistani laws (PECA compilation).
The PTA now says the SMPRA is still being set up, and that the NCCIA handles cybercrime and 'immoral content.' So the Act's central institution is not yet operating, and its content standards are open-ended. 'Harmful' and 'against the ideology of Pakistan' are not measurable tests. A platform cannot know in advance what it must remove, and a court cannot easily review a decision made on that basis.
What a proportionate response looks like
An age-gate for under-16s would raise problems that the PTA's reply points to indirectly.
- Verification means identity collection. Checking age at scale usually means linking accounts to national ID records, which creates a surveillance and data-breach risk for every user, adult or child.
- Blocking tools are blunt. If the regulator cannot block single items under HTTPS, it will not be able to enforce an age rule on specific services without blocking whole platforms.
- Enforcement against evasion is costly. Children who are blocked tend to move to VPNs and less moderated services.
A better sequence would be to:
- Legislate narrow, objective duties on platforms, such as default privacy settings for minors, reporting channels, and response times for child-abuse material.
- Give any new regulator defined powers with judicial review and published transparency reports, before the regulator is given a licensing role.
- Require the PTA and NCCIA to publish blocking data by platform and by legal basis, so that outcomes like the 48.4% rate on X can be examined.
- Test age-assurance methods that do not require a national ID database before mandating any of them.
The takeaway for the court
The PTA's reply is unusually candid. It admits the limits of its powers and does not claim an ability it lacks. The Islamabad High Court should treat that admission as evidence that the missing piece is a statute with clear standards, and that a court order directing the PTA to act under existing law would not supply one. Pakistan's lawmakers can protect children without building a national identity checkpoint for the internet, provided they write narrow rules and take care over who enforces them.