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Pakistan’s telecom authority doesn’t seem willing to give up on its quest to regulate VPN use across the country.
After last year’s failure to ban unregistered VPN services for good, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) shared a new frame on December 19, 2024, introducing a new license category for VPN providers. Companies now need to apply for a permit to operate in the country and avoid potential roadblocks.
The new directive will essentially require VPN providers to collect and share user information with the authorities upon request – de facto going against the stricture. VPN without logs policies of many companies on the market. So, what is at stake for Pakistan VPN users in 2025?
A new chapter in the crackdown on VPNs in Pakistan
Pakistan’s VPN takeover has been a matter of development throughout 2024. The push to regulate its use began when the best VPN Applications have become a crucial tool for people living or visiting the country to maintain access to free internet.
A long list of social media apps remain blocked at the time of writing, in fact. These include X (which has been restricted from February last year), Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and even Bluesky.
After trying to block the use of VPN directly disrupting the services – internet watchdog NetBlocks first reported VPN restrictions seven days after X was blocked – PTA shares plans to regulate the use of VPNs as a way to curb abuse back in August.
“Unregistered VPNs” then become the target. During the following months, the authorities considered these services a “security risk“for Pakistan as they can be used to access ‘sensitive data’, with Pakistan’s top religious body also arguing that using a VPN can go”against Islamic law.”
Pakistani companies and freelancers have been given a deadline of November 30, 2024, to register their services on the PTA portal and avoid blockages. As the day approached, however, the authorities were forced to withdraw the ban due to lack of legal grounds for banning VPNsaccording to the Ministry of Law of Pakistan.
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In a recent report, the PTA also has blame the use of VPN for slow internet speed throughout the country. Experts, however, have long argued that government-imposed censorship is the real culprit behind the slowdown.
Fast forward to the end of December, the PTA announced a new strategy to finally tackle the unregistered VPN matter – VPN providers need to obtain a license in the country to continue working.
“VPN service providers are required to obtain a Class License for Data (Data Services) to provide VPN and related services,” the telecoms regulator wrote in a press release.
The concept of localized VPN service providers was first suggested by the Pakistan Software Houses Association (P@SHA) – a representative of the country’s IT industry – to facilitate the nearly 2.5 million freelancers spread across the nation that every day they rely on these services for work.
Like the English-speaking Pakistani newspaper Dawn saidthe PTA plan provides local companies to provide VPN or proxy services to citizens, instead of foreign companies that are more difficult to control.
“So far (January 8, 2025) only three companies have applied to obtain the VPN service provider license – Zettabyte, Alpha3Cubic, and the state-owned telecommunications company PTCL,” Kalbe Ali, a journalist at dawn, said to TechRadar, adding that licenses have not yet been issued.
Another VPN exodus like India?
The main problem here is that if they become licensed service providers, the anonymity of Pakistan VPN users would be compromised as authorities could monitor VPN traffic. Worse yet, VPN providers will be forced to collect and “promptly provide all information, as and when requested by the Authority. [PTA].”
Such provisions reflect India’s contention data retention law enforced in 2022. At that time, the law caused an exodus of VPN companies from India. The tastes of ExpressVPN, NordVPN, hide.me, Surfsharkand Proton VPN all physically removed servers based in the country to protect the privacy of its users.
Speaking to TechRadar, Proton VPN confirmed that if the PTA’s VPN framework is eventually enforced, the company’s response would be the same as it was three years ago – replace their physical servers with its Smart Routing technology. Physically based in Singapore, these servers could give the user (in this case) a Pakistani IP.
NordVPN’s position seems to be simpler since, a company spokesperson told TechRadar, the provider has no physical servers in Pakistan. “In view of similar regulations, we rely on our remote network virtual serversensuring continuous service in the region without compromising user privacy,” he added.
Surfshark sees the new PTA directives as “a worrying development in the restriction of online freedom” in Pakistan.
Gytis Malinauskas, Head of Legal at Surfshark, told TechRadar: “Taking such radical actions, which have a significant impact on the privacy of millions of people in Pakistan, is likely to be counterproductive and could severely damage the growth of the digital sector of the country”.
According to Malinauskas, not only the privacy of VPN users, but the new rules will also put more Pakistanis’ data at risk of breach. He said, “Accordingly Surfshark Global Data Breach Statisticsover the past 20 years, the account details of 22 million online users in Pakistan have been leaked, making any future breach even more damaging.”
Under Stan, IPVanishThe Chief Commercial Officer also expressed his concern about the new directives, pointing out that so far the company has not received any official notice from the government nor have users complained of any interruption.
However, “We will never compromise our values to keep business in a given region,” he told TechRadar. “Citizens deserve safe, uncensored access to the global internet. If VPN providers are required to log and transmit customers’ internet usage, that will reduce the privacy and freedom of Pakistanis.”
Basically
Given last year’s failures in successfully regulating the use of VPNs in Pakistan, it is difficult to predict what is at stake for all the people who use these services every day across the country.
Asked about the likelihood of the PTA’s new plan being finally implemented, Ali from The Dawn said: “The telecoms regulator PTA has become a laughing stock and a target of criticism on this matter, similar to previous attempts to limit social media and the Internet.”
What is certain, however, is that the public remains divided on the VPN matter. Some people fear that the government will continue to throttle overall Internet speeds to try to prevent people from using these services. While, for most people, a VPN is the only way to maintain their freedom of expression on social media.
Ali said: “The fear is that if VPNs are controlled in any way and the blocking of X becomes successful, the same trend will follow in other forums, and the control of any kind of criticism will tighten more.”
