14 DAY TRIAL // The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has asked the country's ISPs to block over 400,000 websites that contain pornographic material, The Express Tribune reports.
The orders were sent out on Monday, on January 25, and the exact tally includes 429,343 smut-bearing websites.
All sites will be blocked at the ISP level, meaning ISPs would have to support the costs of implementing the technical infrastructure to comply with the government's orders.
Also, the list will be managed by government officials, meaning that site operators that end up on this blacklist due to umbrella pornographic terms used in their domain names may have a hard time going through complicated procedures to remove the ban.
At this moment, the ban has not yet been applied, since most ISPs were caught off guard, and don't have the proper IT systems in place to deal with filtering all their traffic.
The order did not specify a date at which ISPs must comply with the PTA's ruling.
Pakistan clamps down on smut after Supreme Court's decision
According to local press, the decision was taken after the Pakistan Supreme Court issued an order that forced the telecom sector to "take remedial steps to quantify the nefarious phenomenon of obscenity and pornography that has an imminent role to corrupt and vitiate the youth of Pakistan."
Pakistan previously blackballed around 1,000 pornographic sites in 2011. Right after that first ban, local CD and DVD sales of adult material went up tenfolds, as The Independent reported.
According to data provided by Google, Pakistan topped the list of most porn-searching countries in 2014. Six out of the top eight states were Arab countries, with Egypt, Iran, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey also on the list. Except Turkey, pornography is officially banned in all those countries, in all instances motivated by religious reasons.
The same Google data also listed Pakistan as the leader in zoophilia porn searches.
"The fact that Muslim countries dominate the list for pornography searches is alarming in itself, but when you add in the data for the child, animal and homosexual sex searches, it paints quite a disgusting picture of the state of the Islamic world," said Aisha Sabeer, writer for Muslims and the World news portal.
"Pornography addiction is an issue which can no longer be brushed aside by the Muslim community," she also added. "Many Muslims are suffering from this problem and need assistance. If the community continues to deny there is a problem, it makes it harder for them to admit their issues and seek help."