[governance] Internet Authoritarianism - PayPal.com does not authorize Pakistan in its service list, Why?

Wed Apr 8 03:43:06 EDT 2009

Internet Authoritarianism - PayPal does not authorize Pakistan in its
service list, Why?

The People of Pakistan, a populous ICT/Internet Consumer country, are
denied of its basic right to access PayPal.com services in Pakistan!

www.PayPal.com exists today as an important platform for Electronic
Commerce today globally. Knowledge Workers all over the world work
online and recieve payments as well as transfer them to get work done
from other knowledge workers. Unfortunately, PayPal does not include
Pakistan in its list whereas it includes both China and India.
Pakistan – purely from your business perspective may not be that big
of an economy, but it surely has an economy that is larger and more
active than Bhutan, Chad, Honduras, Somalia, Maldives, Rwanda, Uganda,
Yemen —combined!

Pakistan may not be that big on PayPal's radar, perhaps Pakistan is
not even equated to a blip, but a country of 170 Million, to be
blatantly ignored (there may be agreement or disagreement to the
choice of words, if the above mentioned countries can have PayPal, we
would like to know what piece of legislation, law, banking
infrastructure, etc. prevents eBay/PayPal from including Pakistan
under its countries-in-which-PayPal-works umbrella). Pakistan’s
predominant trading Partner happens to be the US. Within respect to
both imports and exports (discounting oil).

Benefit of PayPal.com to the Internet and Civil Society:

Civil Society, the Free & Open Source Software development community
and social development organizations worldwide use PayPal.com to
accept donations or purchase needed products and human resource
services online to fulfill their service to humanity objectives as
PayPal.com offers one of the most secure means to accept and deliver
payments using the Internet to more than a hundred countries worldwide
that includes many developing world regions. PayPal keeps both Bank
Account Details and Credit Card numbers hidden. PayPal enbles easy
acceptance of online payments. You can accept credit card or paypal
payments by embedding html code in your web page. PayPal accepts Visa,
MasterCard, American Express, Discover and eChecks. There is no need
for customers to have a PayPal account and only Business and Premier
account holders can accept payments from a non-PayPal member. With the
PayPal Account Optional feature, customers new to PayPal don’t need to
create a PayPal Account to pay a Money Request/Invoice or to complete
a purchase. Alternatively the customer can pay with a credit card.

PayPal.com's Facilitation to Internet Consumers and Producers:

PayPal enables users to send money to anyone with an email address. To
accept payments online, without a website, PayPal's Email Payments is
a fast and secure way to bill customers and accept credit card, bank,
and PayPal payments online. There is no separate hosting, shopping
cart, payment gateway or merchant account required. For anyone that
requires setting up their own shopping cart, merchant payment, payment
gateway, people have the added problem of security. The cost of a
shared certifcate to make a transaction safe is a hidden cost to
associated with one's own merchant account thus minimum charges of
most merchant accounts can add up fast.These processes are integrated
in the PayPal Shopping CartSoftware so it solves all those problems.
Thus PayPal's transactions are very secure with one's sensitive
financial information is securely stored on their servers. When one
uses PayPal to pay online, they have to simply provide only a PayPal
email address. The merchants/retailers receive payment from PayPal
without ever seeing your financial information. Every PayPal payment
is followed by an email confirming one's transaction. PayPal claims
transactions are covered with 100% protection against unauthorized
payments sent from one's account.

Pledging it to the Authorities:

Even though our claims to have a prosperous IT Industry, we forget the
thousands of knowledge workers that may have or not have any
association with the Pakistani IT industry that can earn large sums of
foriegn exchange for Pakistan working online over the Internet.
Thousands of creative class individuals and freelance groups are
turned down business because PayPal does not authorize Pakistan for
its service.

Todate, none of the IT/ICT industry associations, Ministry of IT&T
Pakistan and Pakistan Software Export Board PSEB have took notice of
this issue that could benefit the country immensely. Thousands of
Pakistani's have discussed and petitioned over this issue over and
over again for nearly a decade now. A search on google for Pakistani's
concerned to get PayPal service authorized for pakistan returns over
4,090,000 with the search string "PayPal for Pakistan". For example:
http://www.petitiononline.com/addpakpp/petition.html

So many options and still no solution, but now:

We have two UK based international banks in Pakistan and the most
recent one is Barclays and these banks have strict account management
and verification policies that can benefit the country if connected
with PayPal. It is worth considering here that if 100,000 creative
class and knowledge workers recieved over USD1000 per month, that
would be quite an amount on monthly basis to bring back both interest
in Pakistani IT Industry's input into the economy as well as demand
for Pakistani Knowledge Work Force.

This is my pledge on behalf of Pakistani People, Pakistan's Creative
Class members and knowledge workers to the world to support us and
help us pledge to convince Ebay PayPal's parent company and PayPal and
Barclays to offer this service in Pakistan.Just to give you a personal
example, a company interviewed me, approved my experience and skills
but couldn't work with me because I didn't have a PayPal account and
this is the same case with thousands of Pakistanis when you browse the
Internet.

PayPal Authorize Pakistan Now! Campaign:

We have also established a global Campaign using Cause Pages on
Facebook.com titled "PayPal Authorize Pakistan Now! Campaign" at:
http://apps.facebook.com/causes/266093?m=085363e0

Please join this voice against Internet Authoritarianism by a
developing world country to support and enable its citizens to be
productivity and prevent its talent from being wasted and the people
of the country to use the Internet to improve their social and
economic conditions. A record of the public activity in Pakistan is
available at the Pakistan ICT Policy Monitor:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/pakistanictpolicy

Please circulate this pledge widely to ICT CS Groups and Lists to help
and support us combat the plagues in our region through ICTs!

-- 

Regards.
--------------------------
Fouad Bajwa
@skBajwa
Answering all your technology questions
http://www.askbajwa.com
http://twitter.com/fouadbajwa
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