This domain name is not controlled by the Pakistan government.
The maulanas are getting wise to it, the militants are catching on, the porn-freaks love it, the movers and shakers like it and loathe it: the Internet in the Land of the Pure, while still in its diapers, is thriving on a mini boom.
A boom that holds all the promise to turn into a major one, almighty government willing. With the state holding a monopoly over the Web business, private operators here are chomping at the cyber-bit. In fact, they´re quite furious about the free surf that the state-run giant PTCL (Pakistan Telecommunications Corporation Limited) enjoys.
"These people can´t tell the Internet from a fishing net," fumes an operator. While that, of course, is stretching it a bit too far, the reaction stems from the fact that private operators are cut up about the exorbitant sums they have to cough up to the PTCL, which has its own service provider named Paknet. "PTCL does not have to pay the taxes we do," says Faisal Ahmed, managing director of Fascom, the only data network operator in the country providing Internet service. ´In addition to everything else, such as 300,000 rupees a year for the licence to operate a service, we have to pay a four percent tax on turnover which means almost half our profits are gone."