When Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari signed the Prevention of Electronic Crimes (Amendment) Act, 2025 into law in January 2025, it slotted neatly into a stack of internet controls already in place: a national firewall throttling speeds, a Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) mandate requiring VPN users to register their IP addresses, and a block on X (formerly Twitter) that has been live since February 2024. Taken together — and not separately — these measures amount to one of the most aggressive crackdowns on online expression in any large democracy today.
The case for proportionate regulation has rarely been clearer. Pakistan's approach gets the cost-benefit calculation backwards, and the country's economy, civil society, and global standing are paying the price.
What the PECA Amendment Actually Does
The amended PECA criminalises 'disinformation' that is 'likely to cause fear, panic, disorder or unrest' with up to three years' imprisonment and a fine of up to PKR 2 million. It also creates a new Social Media Protection and Regulatory Authority (SMPRA) with sweeping powers to order takedowns, block platforms, and refer cases to a new set of social media tribunals.
Reporters Without Borders, Amnesty International, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, and the country's own Joint Action Committee of journalist unions all challenged the law within days of its passage. The Islamabad High Court is hearing multiple petitions arguing that the amendment violates Articles 19 and 19A of the Pakistan Constitution, which guarantee freedom of expression and the right to information.
The legal problem is straightforward: 'disinformation' is not defined with the precision required for a criminal statute. When the underlying conduct is vague but the penalty is custodial, the predictable outcome is self-censorship — which appears to be the point.
Layer One: The X Block
X has been formally inaccessible in Pakistan without a VPN since February 17, 2024, after a senior official alleged election-rigging on the platform. The government has cited 'national security' grounds in submissions to the Islamabad High Court, but has provided no time-bound rationale or sunset clause. The block has now run for more than 15 months.
Internet observatory NetBlocks has repeatedly confirmed the restriction, and Top10VPN's 2024 cost-of-shutdowns report estimated Pakistan's social media restrictions cost the economy more than USD 1.6 billion that year — the highest of any country measured, ahead of Sudan and Myanmar.
Layer Two: The Firewall
Reports of nationwide internet throttling began surfacing in mid-2024 when WhatsApp media downloads stopped working reliably across major mobile networks. The PTA and the IT Ministry have given inconsistent explanations — variously denying a firewall exists, then describing it as a 'web management system,' then citing cybersecurity upgrades. Pakistan's own software industry body, P@SHA, warned in August 2024 that disruptions were costing the IT export sector an estimated USD 300 million.
For a country whose Vision 2025 strategy explicitly targets a USD 15 billion IT export industry, deliberately degrading internet reliability is self-defeating economic policy.
Layer Three: VPN Registration
In late 2024 the PTA announced that all VPN users — individual and commercial — would need to register their IPs, with unregistered VPNs to be blocked. The deadline has been extended multiple times after pushback from banks, BPOs, and freelancers (Pakistan is one of the world's largest freelancer markets on platforms like Upwork and Fiverr). The Council of Islamic Ideology was even asked to opine on whether VPN use is 'un-Islamic' — a remarkable framing for a routine network security tool used by every multinational operating in the country.
Why This Is Bad Regulation, Not Just Bad Politics
Even setting aside the human rights critique, the design fails basic proportionality tests:
- Overbreadth. A criminal 'disinformation' offence inevitably captures satire, opinion, and honest mistakes alongside genuine influence operations.
- Necessity. Pakistan already has defamation, sedition, and incitement laws. The marginal harm PECA 2025 addresses is unclear; the marginal chilling effect is not.
- Least restrictive means. Blocking an entire platform like X for 15 months, when targeted content removal under platform community standards is available, is the regulatory equivalent of demolishing a building to evict one tenant.
- Economic cost. The IT industry, freelance economy, and foreign direct investment in digital services all depend on a functional, predictable internet.
A Better Path
Pakistan does not need to choose between security and the open internet. A proportionate framework would (a) narrow 'disinformation' offences to coordinated inauthentic behaviour with clear intent and demonstrable harm, (b) require judicial — not executive — authorisation for platform blocks, (c) impose sunset clauses on any restriction beyond 72 hours, and (d) publish transparency reports on takedown orders, as India's MeitY now does annually under Rule 4(1)(d) of the IT Rules.
India's own intermediary regime is far from perfect, and we have criticised it elsewhere. But even there, blocks are typically content-specific and time-limited, and the Supreme Court's Shreya Singhal (2015) ruling struck down a similar vague-speech provision (Section 66A) precisely because of the chilling effect we now see operating at national scale in Pakistan.
The Islamabad High Court has an opportunity to do the same. The cost of getting this wrong is not abstract: it is measured in lost export revenue, lost trust in institutions, and a generation of Pakistani internet users learning that the default state of the network is permission, not access.