Blogspot remains blocked

The Pakistan govt. had lifted the block on all ten million blogspot websites on May 3, which was World Press Freedom day. On May 5, the govt. reinstated the ban on all blogspot websites. Reports have come in from a number of cites around the country that the entire Blogspot domain is blocked in its entirety.

The ban has been reported in a number of mainstream news media, including the Washington Post, IFEX, Global Voices, Voice of America, The News, Reporters Sans Borders, Dawn Newspaper and Spider Magazine.

Update: As of Friday the 13, October 2006 the ban remains in place. While blogspot websites can be accessed through other means, it has caused some Pakistani webloggers to move from blogspot to wordpress.com. It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes before that too is blocked.