The federal government is set to relaunch the ‘BEEP’ application for government officials in the coming months.

Chief Executive Officer of the National Information Technology Board (NITB), Faisal Ratyal, informed the National Assembly Standing Committee on Information Technology and Telecom on Tuesday that the BEEP application has been locally developed and certified by all relevant government agencies.

It is pertinent to note that former IT Minister Syed Amin Ul Haque had launched Beep Pakistan in August 2023, beginning with a trial run. The former federal minister, who is now Chairman of the National Assembly IT & Telecom Committee, allocated time to the National Information Technology Board (NITB) to discuss the matter. Mr Haque asked the NITB CEO to ensure the timely rollout of the application.

Ratyal informed the committee that the purpose of launching BEEP is to provide a secure messaging platform for public sector employees across the country. He added that the app will be launched in phases, starting with federal ministries and their attached departments.

“The rollout is expected to begin within the next two months. The app will be integrated with Pakistan’s federal e-Office system to enable secure messaging, document sharing, and workflow coordination within government institutions,” the NITB CEO said.

BEEP offers enhanced security features, including full encryption for text messaging and video calls used by government officials. The committee had earlier raised concerns regarding data security and the safety of official communications, particularly in light of global conflicts witnessed in 2024.

The committee was informed that new features have been incorporated into the BEEP app, including end-to-end encryption for video communications, making it suitable for sensitive government discussions.

Responding to queries regarding the operational costs of the app, Ratyal said BEEP will operate on a usage-based fee model, and efforts are underway to make the platform financially self-sustaining over time. The Secretary IT clarified that revenue generation is not the primary objective of the app, and the main priority remains secure, efficient, and reliable communication across state institutions.

The committee was also informed that the National Computer Emergency Response Team (NCERT) has formally cleared BEEP for official deployment.

Currently, WhatsApp, owned by Meta, remains the most widely used platform for voice and video calls and media sharing; however, its data servers are located outside Pakistan. In contrast, BEEP’s data servers are based within the country, and its security features are more stringent, inspired by platforms such as WeChat.

Earlier, the government launched the federal e-Office system to reduce paperwork and improve transparency. Officials believe that integrating BEEP will further strengthen internal coordination and reduce operational risks.

Internet traffic is up 19% in 2025, according to Cloudflare Radar. Meanwhile, ChatGPT is the most-blocked service on the internet.

Cloudflare

ChatGPT’s crawler GPTBot, which spiders the internet to capture information and turn it into knowledge, is the most-blocked bot on the internet, according to Cloudflare’s 2025 year in review. Meanwhile its biggest rival, Google, is the number one most-allowed crawler. And perhaps even more interestingly, while ChatGPT is the most-blocked bot, it’s actually Anthropic’s Claude AI engine that is the least reciprocally-beneficial service for website owners.

Every year internet infrastructure company Cloudflare publishes an analysis of what’s happening on the internet.

The big news?

• Internet traffic is up 19%
• Starlink traffic is up 130%
• Google is still the most popular internet property (or collection of properties)
• ChatGPT is the most popular AI answer engine
• Facebook is still the most popular social service
• YouTube wins for streaming
• Globo, the Brazilian media giant, is the top news service
• Amazon is still the biggest store on the internet
• WhatsApp is the biggest global messaging service
• Roblox is the biggest global metaverse/gaming platform
• Stripe is the number one payment service on the internet
• Binance is the top crypto wallet/exchange/service for cryptocurrency
• Non-human bots now account for 56.5% of internet traffic
• Google still owns 89.5% of search engine market share
• Chrome is the most popular browser, with 66.2% share
• The biggest cause of internet outages is not accident or disaster: it’s government directed shut-downs
• The United States accounts for 40% of all global bots
• 5.6% of all emails are malicious (containing hacking attacks)

One thing that’s very obvious from the list: China isn’t part of Cloudflare’s service.

While CEO Matthew Prince says a “huge percentage of the Internet” runs through Cloudflare’s network every day, and that’s true, it doesn’t include much, if anything, behind the great firewall of China. The company doesn’t disclose what that percentage is, but we can infer some sense of Cloudflare’s size by the fact that it claims to block “billions of threats online for its customers every day,” and routes billions of web requests daily while owning one of the top DNS services (routing engines for web requests) available.

One of the key categories that Cloudflare measures is not just where traffic is going, but what kind of entity is causing the internet traffic.

Bot use is now over 50% of internet activity, with humans accounting for just 43.5%. The most common bots are search engine bots like Google’s and Bing’s, but the fastest-growing bots are from the AI services that want to know everything that Google already does. That’s ramped up with AI engines, and GPTBot, ChatGPT’s crawler, jumped 305% in usage over the late summer alone.

Some website owners, however, don’t want AI to know everything about what they offer. So they block AI crawlers via their robots.txt file, which is a simple way to say: don’t look at what I have. (Interestingly, compliance is entirely voluntary, and AI service Perplexity, for instance, has been accused of ignoring robots.txt declarations and just spidering sites regardless.)

The most blocked web crawler for 2025 is GPTBot, by OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT. The second most blocked crawler is CCBot, provided by a nonprofit that says it maintains an open-source database on web content, while Google’s own crawler is the third most blocked. However, since people do still want web traffic from Google, Google’s bot is also the most allowed bot on the internet, followed by Microsoft’s Bing bot, and – guess what – OpenAI’s GPTBot.

Confused?

Here’s the deal: different strokes for different folks.

Some website owners want to be seen and used, believing it will help them grow. Others close themselves off from internet crawlers, believing the bots are taking value away without adequate compensation.

About that compensation: Cloudflare offers a Crawl-to-Refer ratio chart that is super interesting. Essentially, it reveals the hidden terms inside the implicit bargain companies make when they allow services to crawl or spider their sites. The ratio is simple: how many times is my website analyzed or searched by a bot, versus how many times does the service send me a real human user.

Old school search engines are by far the best here, providing much more traffic in return for access than AI engines. But not all the AI services are equivalent:

• Google: about 10 to 1 (10 crawls for every 1 visitor sent)
• Baidu: about 1 to 1 (Baidu is a Chinese search engine)
• DuckDuckGo: about 1 to 1
• Microsoft: about 100 to 1 (this is mostly Bing)
• Perplexity: about 100 to 1
• OpenAI/ChatGPT: about 1,000 to 1
• Anthropic: about 100,000 to 1

There’s a curve of attraction here. As a website owner, you want as much traffic from a search engine or AI answer service as possible. 1:1 spidering to referring is almost nirvana, while ten to one isn’t bad, and 100 to one or even 1,000 to one understandable.

100,000 to one: that’s a lot of crawling for almost no discernible return.

Perhaps the oddest little bit of news in Cloudflare’s Radar for 2025 is that the most dangerous domain for malicious and spam email is .christmas. So while celebrating the holidays this year, don’t open any email from a domain that includes the word “Christmas.”