The Government has endorsed the views of the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) that a complete ban on pornographic websites will be difficult, but that they can be filtered.
The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology had recently requested the IAMAI to set up a group to list pornographic websites and provide the same to the Department of Electronics and IT (DeitY), which will take further action on blocking them.
The task group has said that such websites can be ‘filtered’, but cannot be blocked, as servers of such ‘objectionable’ content are mostly located outside India.
“There are around 40 million such websites around the world and it is not possible to block them. The Government does not want to block any websites, but wants to have control over those which result in criminal offences. It wants to create an email service for complaints against such sites,” Subho Ray, President, IAMAI, told
In a recent meeting, Communications and Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad had asked the Cyber Regulation Advisory Committee to look into the matter and IAMAI was tasked with listing such websites.
Similar modelA similar model — email service — has been used in the UK to filter such websites by embedding software in home computers through Internet service providers (ISPs).
Such mechanisms can be studied further and replicated if necessary with modifications for the Indian context, the Cyber Regulation Advisory Committee suggested.
The Committee headed by the Minister met on September 5 to send a response to a writ petition filed by a citizen (Kamlesh Vaswani) in the Supreme Court.
The writ petition sought the blocking of pornographic websites and related content. Also, when a large number of pornographic sites are to be blocked, the latency on Internet access would increase, slowing down Internet speed, it said. Addressing this would require infrastructure at ISPs end to be upgraded.
In its response, the DeitY said it takes ‘prompt action’ under Section 69A of the IT Act, 2000, for blocking of websites with objectionable content whenever requests are received from law enforcement agencies.
“With regard to pornographic sites, to start with, a list of child pornography sites for blocking may be obtained from sources of other countries, where such sites are banned strictly,” the DeitY suggested.