No More Lightbulb Moments for Pakistan

1879 and the lightbulb is invented. Man establishes his victory over the celestial, we have captured the sun, and no room is dark unless we want it. It is a world changing invention and a marvel of design, it lights up entire spaces and it can burn for thousands of hours. There is only one problem: it can burn for thousands of hours. The bulb lasts so long no one needs to buy new ones and greedy pockets are parched.

1920 rolls around and the Phoebus Cartel solves it. They slash the lifetime of bulbs by more than half to keep the buyers coming and it works. They call it planned obsolescence.

More than a century later, the weaponised use of development and withholding innovation is not something Pakistan is unfamiliar with. On 17th September 2025 the Pakistan Space Activities Regulatory Board (PSARB) revealed that the advent of satellite internet in Pakistan is stopped solely by bureaucratic red tape and the inability to finish the registration framework required.

Everything else is in place, and 5 major companies including US-based Starlink have expressed interest in expanding into the Pakistani market, yet they are stopped. Shaza Fatima, Federal Minister for IT and Telecom, said the service was expected to begin by December but not even phase 1 of the set up needed is complete, and internet in this country remains a sought-after service.

Satellite internet, independent from ground wiring, would provide two key advantages to Pakistan. One being reliability. Extreme weather conditions and a lack of upkeep of

infrastructure leads to ground wiring often be disrupted, damaged, or cut, and repairs are slow to enact. Secondly, satellite provision would lead to internet access being significantly easier to expand into remote areas, a benefit that cannot be understated in a country where over 60% of

the population resides in rural areas. Getting online is an obvious benefit that need not much comment and could be a huge step into modernising the vast informal sectors of the Pakistani economy.

However, there is one problem. The biggest enemies of internet access in Pakistan happens to be the Pakistani government and state establishment. Sometimes its specific websites. They blocked Facebook in 2010 for having blasphemous images, YouTube from 2012-2016, Wikipedia for two days in February of 2023 and most recently the X (formerly Twitter) ban that was lifted May of

this year. Overall, the PTA cites over 900,000 blocked URLs as of 2019 for reasons of “blasphemy, pornography and sentiments against the state”. It is the last of these reasons most concerning, and most evident as internet as a service gets repeatedly shut down during times of political turmoil – rallies, elections, protests. They are not protecting the people. They are protecting themselves from the people talking.

Satellite internet then, would be a wedge in the plan. It would get a lot more people online, a lot more people exposed to information the state tries desperately to keep a chokehold on, and a lot more voices to suppress. Secondly, if provided by private actors, especially those with vested Western interests like Starlink owned by Elon Musk who is increasingly entrenched within the US government, it is a lot harder to control and suppress and becomes a risk channel for foreign influence. People talking are a danger. It is when people talk can people plan and mobilise and challenge.

The solution then? Control where they talk, and what they say, and what they hear. The solution is to infinitely delay satellite internet and get away with it because no one can protest the lack of advanced internet when they don’t even have food on their tables. This is not the first time this

strategy has been used. In fact, it’s a staple of Pakistan’s agrarian roots. Most farmers work under feudal landlords who control huge sections of their existence and deliberately withhold advanced farming technology so that the farmers stay dependant on these landlords and cannot compete.

They create flesh tractors because mechanical tractors don’t pay rent. This is the same planned

obsolescence the Phoebus Cartel absconded with in the 1920s, except now its planned stagnation and ultimately weaponised regression. It is easy to suppress the hungry and the poor, so they do.

The best invention in the world is useless without access to it. Access to the best invention in the world is dangerous if unfairly given. Without fair access and creating our own systems of provision, Pakistan risks remaining in the dark, not for a lack of light, but because the head of the house prefers the shadows.