The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority has officially started granting licenses to VPN providers.
Pakistan’s telecom authority continues its quest to regulate the use of unlicensed VPNs across the country despite pushbacks.
On April 18, 2025, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) granted the needed license to three companies in order to provide their services in the country. The Authority now urges all VPN providers operating in Pakistan to obtain a license to avoid potential service disruptions.
All this comes as increasingly more Pakistanis have been using some of the best VPN services to access X, which has been blocked since February 2024, and other restricted social media platforms.
Having failed to ban VPNs entirely, the government has now resorted to mandatory licensure to regulate their usage. Eventually, this means that most if not all traffic information belonging to Pakistani VPN users will be monitored by authorities.
However, larger providers like Proton has resorted to anti-censorship features to circumvent this restriction.
Talking to TechRadar back in December, Proton VPN confirmed that if the PTA’s VPN framework is eventually enforced for all providers, the company’s response would be to replace its physical servers with its Smart Routing technology, as the company did in India in 2022.
TechRadar has approached some of the top providers for comment on the matter, but we are still waiting for a response at the time of writing.
Do you think mandatory VPN licensure would become a common problem in other countries?