Is the internet in Pakistan behind a firewall?

Is the internet in Pakistan behind a firewall?
Recently internet speeds throughout Pakistan have significantly diminished, leading to widespread outrage and allegations that the government is covertly implementing a new firewall system to enhance its surveillance and control over the nation’s internet. The government has denied any responsibility for this slowdown, which has impacted millions of users and caused disruptions for businesses nationwide. Founder and Director of Netblocks, Alp Toker, tells SOEP what has been happening and what might be the cause. 

Taxi fares in Kenya – can drivers beat the algorithms?
Taxi drivers in Kenya have taken on the algorithms of ride hailing apps such as Uber, Bolt and Little by working together to increase fares above those suggested by the apps. The drivers say they can’t pay for fuel and car loans at current prices. Following a number of strikes in the summer, some of the apps have now increased fares and reward programmes for the drivers in a bid to stop the price war.   

The programme is presented by Gareth Mitchell and the studio expert is Ania Lichtarowicz.

More on this week's stories:
Internet slows to a crawl, stoking fears of firewall in Pakistan 
Hard-pressed Kenyan drivers defy Uber's algorithm, set their own fares    

Transcript

00:00:00 Gareth Mitchell 

Hello, it's Gareth. Welcome along to Somewhere on Earth. It is Tuesday the 27th of August 2024. 

00:00:14 Gareth Mitchell 

And with us for some experting today, by popular demand is Ania Lichtarowicz whose only  producer and editor. Ania very much multitasking today. So how are you Ania? 

00:00:25 Ania Lichtarowicz 

I am completely multitasking as it is still the school summer holidays in the UK. And we have a number of extra bodies in the house that we usually don't have, and this is quite taxing on things like the Internet, so hopefully it will continue to have a good connection, although I can't guarantee it now. What I really want to know about is those Internet packages you can get in the UK where you can prioritize bandwidth for work over, say, entertainment. 

00:00:56 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Video games, that kind of thing online. I don't know how it works. It might be as simple as just ordering your devices 12345 and the higher the number that will be connected and lower ones won't be. If the connection isn't as good, I think that's what I need at the moment, Gareth. 

00:01:13 Gareth Mitchell 

Maybe. Well, I think we're about to see whether your your Internet connection and your modem and the whole kit and caboodle between you and the nearest node 

00:01:24 Gareth Mitchell 

is going to be fully configured and able to detect that you're doing serious work here and anybody else in the house is not allowed to use more than their fair share of the Internet, there we are, unless they're doing serious work as well. 

00:01:37 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Well, you've met my children, haven't you, Gareth? 

00:01:39 Gareth Mitchell 

Sure have, they do serious work. But it's the holidays, so maybe not at the moment. OK, this is great. I think everything is working, which means I've just jinxed it. So within seconds it won't. But let's do our best. Here we go. 

00:02:00 Gareth Mitchell 

And coming up today. 

00:02:03 Gareth Mitchell 

Internet speeds going down in Pakistan, ride sharing app prices going down in Kenya. Those are the themes today as speculation grows that Pakistan is building itself a China style firewall. After all, what else might explain the country's recent snail like Internet speeds? Meanwhile, in Kenya, a price war 

00:02:22 Gareth Mitchell 

between multinational and local start up taxi apps is making things so tough for drivers,  they're ignoring the algorithms and creating their own fare structures. That's all coming up right here on Somewhere on Earth. 

00:02:43 Gareth Mitchell 

All right then. So in Pakistan, the Internet has been grinding to a halt in recent weeks. So could it be that it could be just too many people using virtual private networks or VPNs? Or perhaps it's because of a faulty submarine Internet cable? Could it even be that Pakistan is building a China style Internet firewall to monitor traffic and to control dissent. 

00:03:06 Gareth Mitchell 

Well, it depends who you ask. Nothing to see here, say the Pakistani authorities. We're just upgrading our web management system, but activists and web monitoring bodies say that something more ominous might be going on. So what is going on? Who better than Alp Toker to tell us Alp is founder and director at the technology platform Netblocks, whose Internet observatory reports on disruption to internet traffic around the world. Welcome along Alp, how are you?  

00:03:29 Gareth Mitchell 

00:03:33 Alp Toker 

Hi, Gareth, not too bad and you? 

00:03:36 Gareth Mitchell 

Well, all good. Thank you. So what the heck has been going on with Pakistan's Internet? And by the way, before we talk about what might be behind it, can you give a sense of just how disruptive the Internet has been? 

00:03:46 Alp Toker 

The Internet in Pakistan has been disrupted in different ways, so you've got the latency, you've got the slowdowns, you've also got services that have just stopped working. You have some that are clearly sensored, 

00:03:59 Alp Toker 

and some that are impacted by other network issues. So it's this combination of problems that have really clustered together to create a terrible Internet environment for ordinary people right now. 

00:04:12 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, because they were at riots last year, weren't there, you know, widely reported. And Pakistan, which habitually throttles the Internet anyway, in other words, it slows it down. It blocked some social media sites amid those riots didn't it. 

00:04:25 Alp Toker 

Right, so Pakistan really cracked down on the free Internet over the last year and these were political censorship measures. So during the opposition rallies by Imran Khan and and and his latest party PTI, 

00:04:41 Alp Toker 

the authorities really tried to stop these because they allege that they were going against the law, whereas a lot of people just wanted to get out on the streets and protest the government, so 

00:04:51 Alp Toker 

in this light, authorities used various forms of throttling, including shutting off most of the Internet at a couple of points, but then also reverting to slightly less intrusive forms of censorship, such as just shutting down social media platforms or messaging apps. 

00:05:11 Alp Toker 

And during this time, they got a lot of practice in. So they really developed the initial workflows for a more comprehensive censorship platform. But eventually those protests died down and elections were held and things stabilized, but that desire for authorities to create a more comprehensive censorship system is still present, very much so. 

00:05:35 Gareth Mitchell 

So we know that Pakistan has form, shall we say when it comes to Internet censorship. We also know, as you've been discussing, that the Internet has been slowing down. So in this case, can we put that particular two and two together and make four or five or something? 

00:05:49 Alp Toker 

Well, life would be too easy, if it was that simple. Unfortunately, it's not purely an intentional censorship incident. Now from what we've been tracking, there is some credibility to authorities’ claim that this is related to a systems change in in the infrastructure. 

00:06:09 Alp Toker 

What they call a web management system is really a euphemism, obviously for a filtering or censorship platform. So whichever product they're using now, it's unfortunately more of the same. And we know that this installation has obviously added a lot of  

00:06:25 Alp Toker 

load on the servers that they're using to try and filter this content online, they're trying to filter all the residential ISPs. But beyond this there's also an additional situation that's arisen in the last few weeks with cable outages that have also affected neighbouring countries. 

00:06:46 Alp Toker 

So adding to that load, you now have also this degradation of service from the cable services. So it's really created a perfect storm where not a lot works on Pakistan's Internet right now. 

00:06:58 Gareth Mitchell 

So why might officials be blaming extensive VPN use? Because they have said that, haven't they? They've just said, you know, it wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for so many people just trying to sort of get around all kinds of restrictions by using these virtual private networks or VPNs. 

00:07:12 Alp Toker 

Well, whose fault could that be? The people are using VPN's because they aren't able to connect to the services directly. A VPN routes around or tunnels across different parts of the Internet so that users can get through. 

00:07:27 Alp Toker 

And interestingly enough, when a VPN is used, people can actually regain access to these services, not just in the cases of known censorship, but also, quite interestingly, in the more recent outages that have been slightly ambiguous, which tells us obviously that it's not just your connection that's slowing down, because the connection physically is working well enough 

00:07:47 Alp Toker 

to support that VPN. But then things work through that tunnel, but authorities have claimed that the VPN's are now slowing down the whole internet. Is this possible? 

00:08:00 Alp Toker 

At a pinch, it's technically possible that this can create some unexpected load if you've really underprovisioned your infrastructure, but in reality this is an excuse for more of the same. 

00:08:11 Gareth Mitchell 

So Ania, what is your take on this? What is interesting about this story as far as you're concerned like editorially on this podcast? 

00:08:19 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Well, I think we really need to have a look at the impact on business. You can read online about people complaining about the impact of Internet restrictions on their businesses, especially  you know for instance 

00:08:31 Ania Lichtarowicz 

online sales. Um, these are very significant cuts for people. Also education, as many people do still learn online and they can't continue with their studies. So if Internet access is this poor just listening to, out there about VPNs, I can't imagine 

00:08:50 Ania Lichtarowicz 

that could be having such an impact on connectivity. Alp, you know much more about this than I do, but you know, so many people around the world use VPNs and especially where there are Internet restrictions online, I find it hard to believe VPNs would have such an impact on connectivity. 

00:09:09 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, I mean, ALP, plenty of other countries have people who use VPNs and they don't see their Internet falling over, do they? 

00:09:16 Alp Toker 

Right. So another way of looking at it is that the obstruction that Pakistan has provisioned isn't necessarily set up to support these VPNs, whether intentionally or otherwise, which means that they're really focusing on allowing the flow of web traffic. Now, why would they want to prioritize web traffic? Well, it's easier to filter. So if you have this setup here where there's two tier system then obviously 

00:09:46 Alp Toker 

it's not clear that the VPNs are causing damage at all, and if we look at the economic impacts, I think that is also a huge thing that's going on here, and authorities don't really seem to care. With our cost of shutdown tool, we calculated that around 140 days of the X  

00:10:06 Alp Toker 

disruption, Twitter X has been out for around 140 days, at a cost over half million U.S. dollars, for example, an equivalent. 

00:10:16 Alp Toker 

So that's serious money, and that's not even one of the major platforms there. So if you now consider all the local apps, all the other platforms that aren't working and all the things that you just do on say WhatsApp to keep your own life and business running, that's that's actually quite difficult to estimate. It's really, really getting on people's nerves, and rightly so. 

00:10:42 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Ania, go for it. 

00:10:43 Ania Lichtarowicz 

I understand the submarine cable excuse that's been given to a point, as other countries in the region have also been impacted, but this China firewall, can you explain to me how that could possibly be set up? Surely you know it just can't spring up overnight? 

00:11:02 Alp Toker 

Right. So when we talk about a firewall, we're talking about a filter that is basically applied to most or all of the residential Internet connectivity in the country, except sometimes where there are exceptions for politicians. I mean, all you know, all people are equal, but some more equal than others,  

00:11:22 Alp Toker 

and then you have also monitoring that's tied into this, because the same type of technology, that's deep packet inspection technology, that can filter content can also make it much easier for authorities to find out what people are visiting, what websites people are using, what services they're using, are not necessarily the actual content itself, but they get a lot of metadata from this technology, so it takes obviously a lot of investment, financial investment to develop servers, a server farm that can filter so much traffic in  

00:11:57 Alp Toker 

real time and that gives you a sense of where authorities priorities are right now in that it's not the people's losses, but it's the development of this web management, this so-called web management system that has been the priority, and it has been a long time coming and even a few years back there were attempts at coordinated filtering of content. 

00:12:18 Alp Toker 

You would see that Internet providers would lose service to certain websites at roughly the same time using a centralized database. So that has existed experimentally for a little while, but this time it's all about actually piping that traffic through a central gateway which could in a worst case scenario lead Pakistan down a path like Iran, which obviously has a very limited version of what we know as the Internet. 

00:12:46 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, it's known as the Halal Internet, isn't it, in Iran?  Also, how significant would it be then if it turns out Pakistan is indeed building this China style firewall, and so it joins company with the likes of China and Iran. How significant would that be? 

00:13:04 Alp Toker 

Well, Pakistan is obviously a huge country and it's also a country that has been used to a relatively free Internet, so businesses and lifestyles have formed around this. 

00:13:17 Alp Toker 

Whereas in China local alternatives have developed, the capacity is there to at least provide a form of local Internet for users. In Pakistan, none of that infrastructure exists. So you're taking away something that works without providing really any realistic prospect of a replacement. So that just means going gradually, from poor Internet to even less Internet  with no alternatives for those platforms. And in that light it's really a problem that's going to get worse and worse. The more content Pakistan seeks to filter and there's no no real local industry insight that is going to fill those gaps. 

00:14:03 Gareth Mitchell 

All right. Well, we'll leave it there for now. Alp. Thank you very much indeed. That's Alp Toker from Netblocks. And Alp, do stay on. So I think you may have a thing or two to say about this next item because we're going over to Kenya, where it's a good time to be a taxi passenger, but less good if you're a driver. That's because a price war has broken out between Uber and its main competitors 

00:14:22 Gareth Mitchell 

forcing down fares and crushing drivers' incomes so much so that drivers are now defying the algorithmically set prices and formulating their own fare structures. Not that there's much money around anyway. Kenyans are dealing with tax hikes, high interest rates and soaring prices in the shops. So, Ania, you've been following this, haven't you? So tell me a little bit more what is causing this taxi price war. 

00:14:46 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Well, it's the ride hailing apps and the competition between the big players. So obviously Uber and Bolt and also with smaller local African apps for instance Faras and Little. I don't know if you've ever experienced this Gareth, but I did actually very recently, 

00:15:07 Ania Lichtarowicz 

with cab apps in the Baltic States. I was getting, ordering cabs to take us places and I was finding I was getting push notifications from another provider saying oh look go with us instead, we're cheaper, we're quicker etcetera, etcetera.  

00:15:20 Ania Lichtarowicz 

So the companies know that someone’s maybe undercutting them, algorithms you know are then adapted, prices go lower. Now obviously these apps are all  

00:15:40 Ania Lichtarowicz 

competing for your customs and therefore you know that's why they're pushing the fares lower, but the drivers have also complained. It's not only about fares, but it's also about things like practicality. There aren't enough pick up points or drop off points, so that's also an issue in this. 

00:15:56 Gareth Mitchell 

Oh dear. So how much is all this price war stuff. How much is it affecting fares? 

00:16:00 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Well, the fares for Uber, for instance, start at 200 Kenyan shillings. That's about 1 1/2 U.S. dollars. Just over. And then you add on to that however long you travel for and these,  

00:16:12 Ania Lichtarowicz 

you know, price per kilometre tariffs have also gone down. Now drivers in Nairobi are saying that a 12 hour shift will not cover fuel and loan payments for their cars. So it's just unsustainable. 

00:16:26 Gareth Mitchell 

So drivers are taking matters into their own hands, then, aren't they? They're constructing their own fare structures and their own minimum prices, and they're even printing all this on laminated sheets and presenting those to the customers. Saying, ignore your app. Look at the sheet, it's going to be this much, is that, that's what they're doing. 

00:16:37 Ania Lichtarowicz 

They are. 

00:16:41 Ania Lichtarowicz 

They are. So the drivers banded together. They communicated with each other to charge higher and they said fairer fares. So they did this through the Walkie-talkie app apparently. Now this is an app that literally does what a walkie-talkie does. So you invite people to join and then you can contact them in a tap. So this meant that drivers were all charging the same fares, not undermining each other. 

00:17:05 Ania Lichtarowicz 

So if you were a customer and said I'm not paying that, that's too much. I can get someone cheaper. They would find that they couldn't. So this was the only way the drivers could try and beat the algorithms. Now obviously this goes against the guidelines of the Big Ride Hailing App. So they asked drivers to stop this. 

00:17:23 Ania Lichtarowicz 

However, there have been two strikes, including one of five days in July from taxi drivers about fair prices. Big companies are wanting a solution because obviously this is a huge emerging market for them and they're losing money. Now you mentioned the laminated sheets as well. Now their drivers created these themselves. 

00:17:42 Ania Lichtarowicz 

On it, it's explained to the passengers that they want to charge more than the app and why so, for instance, their starting rate was higher by 100 shillings, so not 200, but 300. And they also increased the cost of the rest of the ride by about 1 ½ times. 

00:18:01 Gareth Mitchell 

Hmm, I'm just wearing my cynical hat here. I wonder if there might be just one or two rogue drivers who are thinking, hmm, if I just go a little bit lower than these guys with their laminated sheets, then I can get more business. But let's hope people aren't doing that. But anyway, look, are customers heeding Ania, are they saying, yeah, fair enough. Because after all, as we heard in the introduction many people in Kenya are really feeling the pinch financially at the moment themselves aren't they. 

00:18:26 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Well, I mean, it was only back in July that we heard from Wairimu about the protests in Nairobi and across Kenya, about the tax hikes and the rising  

00:18:35 Ania Lichtarowicz 

interest rates. So we know that many people in the country are facing serious financial issues, but the drivers are saying that we're quite calm about this. We explain why we're doing this and if people say, well, we won't pay, we can't pay, then we cancel that and they can try and find another driver. But they're saying about half the customers  

00:18:55 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Have been paying once they know what it's all about. So you know there there is some solidarity there with the drivers. 

00:19:03 Gareth Mitchell 

But there's been a little bit of movement in this dispute, hasn't there? 

00:19:06 Ania Lichtarowicz 

There has, there’s been literally a little bit of movement because Little is a Pan African super app platform, which is actually made in Kenya. But it's also in on the ride hailing business and now they announced a 15% increase in ride rates. 

00:19:25 Ania Lichtarowicz 

So they're saying look, this will mean slightly higher costs for clients, but it guarantees more reliable and convenient services. Uber have also increased prices by about 10%. They've added more categories to their apps. So now for instance, you can pick an Uber Comfort as well. And there are a few other choices there, of ride. 

00:19:44 Ania Lichtarowicz 

And also they say they've improved their reward programmes for drivers, so at the moment things seem to have settled down a little. 

00:19:52 Gareth Mitchell 

Oh I hope so. Yeah. So there are a few little strategies differentiating the product. Yeah, that can get you around it. I do wonder if at some point regulation may have to come in here to just try and sort this whole pickle out. 

00:20:02 Gareth Mitchell 

Or I don't know what the ride sharing apps can do about it, but then they're in business, aren't they? Hey, that's capitalism, right? But that would be a very long discussion, and we've all had a drink, so let's not go there. 

00:20:14 Gareth Mitchell 

Alp Toker still on the line from Netblocks. There is a connection here for you, isn't there? In that some of the activity you've been seeing around recent events in Kenya, and indeed protests, and you've seen how that's been affecting the Internet through your observatory over there at Netblocks, what have you found? 

00:20:31 Alp Toker 

Indeed, so Kenya gave us quite a few surprises this year because Kenya has usually had, has traditionally had a free Internet. It's not a country that comes to mind when you think of Internet shutdowns and Internet censorship. But there were these protests that Ania was talking about during June, July and there was in particular the Reject Finance Bill protest, which got quite heated and there was a deadly crackdown. 

00:21:00 Alp Toker 

There were various casualties and authorities had said just a day before, quite unusually, they actually went and they made a statement saying that they would not shut down the Internet. They would not impose an Internet shutdown. 

00:21:15 Alp Toker 

But yet, lo and behold, in a number of hours, Internet connectivity was cut down to below half of of ordinary levels. 

00:21:26 Alp Toker 

And in addition to that, there were some disruptions to online platforms. So there was this unexpected apparent restriction. Authorities again blamed a subsea cable, but there wasn't really much indication of it. And the timing was quite suspect. So either scheduled maintenance happening there or something,  

00:21:51 Alp Toker 

not quite unplanned and that obviously resulted in people not really hearing about the extent of the protest, but particularly the casualties that happened during those protests. So as people fight for their economic freedoms and their free markets or just their ability to live day by day,  

00:22:12 Alp Toker 

they're obviously struggling to also get their voices out. That's also something that could potentially extend to the taxi apps. Now if this unexpected unregulated industry continues to develop with the taxi apps,  

00:22:29 Alp Toker 

authorities do have the means to restrict the back end servers that the apps connect to, so that would result in a kind of cat and mouse game where these apps would stop working and they would have to push updates. So certainly if things get out of hand, these apps could face restrictions, so it's going to be interesting to see how things develop. 

00:22:49 Gareth Mitchell 

It sure is. Great. Well, thank you very much Alp for just giving us extra context around Kenya and you Ania as well for telling us about that story. And if you yourself are in Nairobi or anywhere around Kenya where this is an issue for you with your ride sharing apps, then do let us know, let us know what you think. 

00:23:09 Gareth Mitchell 

I mean the bonus would be if you're a driver. I wonder, I don't know how many Kenyan, Uber or ride sharing app drivers listen to us, but we'd love to hear from you. So folks, you can see this coming, can't you? I'm going to give you all the socials and the different ways of getting in touch, so bear with me. Here we go. Via e-mail it's hello@somewhere onearth.co and 

00:23:31 Gareth Mitchell 

that's hello@somewhereonearth.co and on WhatsApp we are international code 44 for the UK 748-632-9484. But I hope you have that in your phone already, if not, jog back 20 seconds and listen to that number again. Put it in your phone. 

00:23:46 Gareth Mitchell 

And leave us a voice memo, because then you get to hear your voice on this podcast, and then the more of you there is, the less of me there is and than that probably makes everybody happy. And across many of the other socials. Then you won't go too far wrong if you just search for things like S.O.E.P or soap tech or Somewhere on Earth, or possibly my name, Gareth Mitchell or Ania’s as well. She's on it so often these days, Ania Lichtarowicz. Just try spelling that family name if you can. I think I've cracked it after about 20 years of working with Ania. 

00:24:12 Ania Lichtarowicz 

You have, just about, just about. 

00:24:14 Gareth Mitchell 

I just need to learn how to pronounce it now, don’t I. 

00:24:19 Ania Lichtarowicz 

Lichtarowicz. It's not that hard. You’re almost there. 

00:24:20 Gareth Mitchell 

I'm trying. I'm trying, very trying says Ania. Yeah. So there you go. Very few credits for you today because we're doing this one at home basically so. But we'll give a shout out anyway to Lanson's Team Farner, which is our usual base and they really look after us over there. 

00:24:37 Gareth Mitchell 

So thank you to Keziah, Dylan and Calum over there. The production manager is Liz Tuohy. The editor is Ania. I I I just, I'm going to mess up the family name. I'm nervous now. And I'm Gareth. Thanks for for listening. Sorry about that terrible ending. See you soon, folks. Take care. Bye. Bye.