Pakistan has spent the last two years running a real-world experiment in whether a state can wall off a major social platform in a country of 240 million people. The verdict, by mid-2026, is in: it cannot — at least not without imposing costs on its own citizens, freelancers, and exporters that far outweigh whatever order ministers believe they are restoring.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) blocked X (formerly Twitter) in February 2024 in the wake of the contested general elections. What was framed as a temporary measure has now passed its second anniversary, with the platform still unreachable on Pakistani networks in May 2026. Through 2025 and into 2026, the PTA layered on a parallel campaign against the predictable consequence of that block: mass adoption of virtual private networks. Citizens, businesses, journalists, and the country's large IT-export workforce all migrated to VPNs to keep working. The regulator's response was to require commercial and individual VPNs to register with the PTA, and to intermittently throttle or degrade traffic from unregistered services.
In November 2024 the Council of Islamic Ideology — a constitutional advisory body — weighed in with a fatwa-style ruling that the use of VPNs to access blocked content was un-Islamic, lending religious cover to a regulatory project that was otherwise struggling to justify itself. By March 2026, Access Now's annual KeepItOn report on global internet shutdowns named Pakistan among the world's worst offenders, citing both the prolonged X blackout and repeated mobile internet shutdowns in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa during protests and security operations.
A Policy That Punishes the Compliant
The case for Pakistan's approach, as articulated by officials, rests on three claims: that X is a vector for disinformation and incitement, that unregulated VPNs frustrate lawful investigation, and that registration creates accountability. Each of these is a legitimate concern. The problem is that the chosen instruments do not deliver on any of them, while imposing heavy collateral costs.
Start with the X block. Twitter/X is the smallest of Pakistan's major platforms by user base — Meta's services dwarf it — yet it is the one most heavily used by journalists, lawyers, opposition politicians, and the diaspora. Blocking it does not remove the content; it removes the domestic audience's ability to see and respond to it, while the conversation continues abroad. The Pakistani government has effectively ceded narrative control to accounts beyond its jurisdiction, while denying its own citizens the chance to push back.
VPN registration compounds the error. A VPN's entire value proposition is that the provider cannot, or will not, hand user traffic to a government. A registered, PTA-approved VPN is a contradiction in terms — anyone serious about evading surveillance will simply use an unregistered one, of which there are tens of thousands. The registry therefore filters for the most compliant, lowest-risk users — typically businesses with auditors and IT departments — while leaving genuinely adversarial users untouched. It is a regulation that punishes the law-abiding and exempts the targets.
The Economic Bill
Pakistan's IT and IT-enabled services exports were a rare bright spot in an otherwise constrained economy, with the State Bank reporting record monthly export figures through 2024 and 2025. That sector runs on cloud APIs, GitHub, Slack, Zoom, AWS consoles, Stripe dashboards, and increasingly on AI tools — almost all of which depend on stable, low-latency international connectivity. VPN throttling makes that work measurably harder, and shutdowns in regional hubs make it impossible. The Pakistan Software Houses Association (P@SHA) has publicly warned that connectivity disruptions threaten the country's bid to grow software exports past $5 billion.
The cost of shutdowns is not abstract. NetBlocks and the Internet Society's NetLoss calculator have repeatedly estimated that prolonged platform blocks and regional blackouts cost Pakistan's economy hundreds of millions of dollars per year in lost output, foreign exchange, and forgone investment. None of those losses are offset by any measurable security gain that the government has been willing or able to document.
A Proportionate Path Exists
None of this means Pakistan must tolerate genuinely harmful content. Incitement to violence, child sexual abuse material, and coordinated inauthentic behaviour are addressable through narrower instruments: targeted court-ordered takedown requests, transparency mandates on platform reporting, and bilateral law-enforcement cooperation. Several of these tools already exist under Pakistan's Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA), which was further amended in 2025 — and the amendments have themselves drawn criticism from press freedom groups for vagueness and overbreadth.
A proportionate framework would do four things. It would set a statutory time limit on any platform-level block, with judicial review after a short window. It would require the PTA to publish a public reasoned order each time it issues a blocking direction, as India's Supreme Court required in Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India (2020). It would drop the VPN registry, which serves no security purpose its proponents can credibly articulate. And it would commit Pakistan to the #KeepItOn principles of avoiding network-level shutdowns except in narrowly defined emergencies.
The alternative is the path Pakistan is already on: a population that has learned to route around its regulator, an export sector quietly bleeding contracts, and a state whose digital sovereignty claims grow louder as its actual control erodes. Shutdowns and VPN bans are an admission of weakness dressed up as strength. Pakistan's citizens have responded by buying tunnels. The honest policy response is to ask why they need them.