Is youtube really blocked in Pakistan?

Pakistani government banned youtube several times following certain events but the last ban placed on September 17, 2012 is the by far the longest ban on youtube in Pakistan imposed by the government, because of the blasphemous content posted on the video sharing website. The government has taken desperate measures to take down the content by blocking the site altogether.

In my opinion, blasphemous content should be removed from the website on top priority and measures should be taken so that something of this sort and magnitude never happens again, but this generally is not how the internet works, we have to understand the dynamics of the internet to get to a solution for this problem.

With all due respect to the government of Pakistan, I think the actions government is currently taking are not capable of resolving this issue. Being a networks professional I know it is not very hard to implement content screening services to block specific URLs containing blasphemous content considering we find efficient ways to screen HTTPS service requests, but for how long will we keep on doing that, once we block everything on internet there will be new content for us to start over.

We have to think of a rational solution as the site hosts abundant educational content like khanacademy.org, the need to access such educational content has enabled even non-technical users to use proxy softwares to access the content? So, I fail to understand if youtube is really blocked in Pakistan when everyone can access the website by just installing a freely available proxy software to access the content. I think we should think out of the box to get this issue resolved, some of the solutions I can think of over the top of my head are:

1. Block youtube and all other video content hosting sites, provide alternates in Pakistan which replicate all educational videos and non blasphemous videos from all available content hosting sites to a pakistani video content hosting site so we have complete control. Just like China did.

2. Calculate MD5/SHA1 for the video and compare that with all the videos available on internet and search for identical MD5/SHA1 hashes and if any found the links are forwarded to some moderation authority to process.

3. We can do a frame by frame analysis on each and every video available on internet based on frames on blasphemous videos as there is a possibility that the uploader modifies the same video to change the MD5/SHA1 hash, for every video if it achieves a certain frame match threshold ratio the video is forwarded to the moderation team to take further actions.

4. We can start a crowdsource video tagging initiative where the end users tag video as inappropriate and the moderation team blocks the content.

Yes, I understand that method 2 and 3 would require a lot of compute power but this could be the only possible sustainable solution.

Please share your thoughts.