
Pakistan PM Shehbaz Sharif's YouTube channel blocked in India
"The content is currently unavailable in this country because of an order from the government related to national security or public order. For more details about government removal requests, please visit the Google Transparency Report," read a message on the blocked channel.
The government had earlier this week blocked 16 Pakistani YouTube channels for allegedly disseminating "false, provocative and communally sensitive content" about India.
The YouTube channels blocked are Dawn News, Irshad Bhatti, SAMAA TV, ARY NEWS, BOL NEWS, Raftar, The Pakistan Reference, Geo News, Samaa Sports, GNN, Uzair Cricket, Umar Cheema Exclusive, Asma Shirazi, Muneeb Farooq, SUNO News and Razi Naama.
The government also strongly objected to the BBC's reportage on the Pahalgam attack. This development follows recommendations from the Ministry of Home Affairs in the wake of the April 22 terror attack in Pahalgam, a famous tourist destination in south Kashmir, where 26 people were gunned down.
Meanwhile, the Instagram accounts of leading current and former Pakistani cricketers, including Babar Azam, Mohammad Rizwan, and Wasim Akram, were also restricted in India, intensifying the digital crackdown on influential personalities across the border in the aftermath of the terror attack. The list of restricted accounts also includes Test captain Shan Masood and pacers.
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On the other hand, Meta apps such as Instagram and WhatsApp dominate our obviously has several disadvantages and more so in this era of tariff wars, closing borders and increased focus on sovereignty and security. The global order is changing and Big Tech is in the middle of the power play because those who are reliant on it have a weaker hand at the table. The Prime Minister knows this well.'No one can deny the fact that the 21st century is technology-driven. Countries which excelled at technology reached the summit of development, their economic power reaching new heights,' PM Modi said in his speech. "Be it the creative world or social media, I urge all young people of the country to come forward to develop our own platform. Why should we be dependent on others? Why should India's wealth go overseas?"RIGHT IDEA, BIG CHALLENGESIn a world where Big Tech is fast turning into a bargaining chip — just look at how quickly a few days ago Microsoft cutoff an Indian oil refinery from its Azure servers — tech sovereignty is a worthy pursuit. Not just worthy, it might be necessary. The problem, however, is that India might not find it easy to create a Google or Microsoft challenges on the ground are severe. There is a problem of retaining and helping the right talent which can build world-class tech products. Indians do so in the US, but for reasons, some obvious like red-tape, and some not so obvious, the same engineers and tech founders have not been able to build similar products in India. In fact, in product space our record so far has been Koo, for example. Started as a clone of Twitter and promoted heavily, including by people part of the Indian government, the little yellow chick never managed to take a flight. 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There is still a debate if it was indeed a scam or just some enterprising folks exploiting the lax rules that the IT ministry set for the competition. But the fact remains: in the name of the Made-In-India browser, someone passed a copy of a US-based browser to the Indian IT Ministry and walked away with Rs 75 the kind of products that Big Tech makes can be managed only with resources, ingenuity and a regulatory environment that allows for the development of such services. Once a product is out there, it then needs scale in terms of technology. For example, even if an Indian company develops an email service better than Gmail, it is not going to have the necessary backend to service it to even 100 million people. Google, which does it, manages because the company designs its own servers and runs clusters that consume more power than electricity used by a small far, we have not seen any Indian tech company manage to gather and make use of all the ingredients that are needed to create something like YouTube or X aka Twitter in India. The Indian tech companies that have gained some prominence in product space are clones, such as Ola, Zomato and Flipkart. One exception to this is Zoho, which, in the enterprise segment, has managed to carve out a space for itself despite challenges from the likes of Salesforce, Microsoft and said that, nothing that is worth doing is easy. If something needs to be built, the challenges must be met and overcome. On this count, it is significant that the Prime Minister has given a clarion call. And now that a call has been given, Indian IT giants and startups must rise to the occasion even if the odds are stacked against them.- Ends