Now, Indian Government Wants To Ban Porn!

Now, Indian Government Wants To Ban Porn!

There are greater chances that if blocking takes place on a large volume, then it may affect Internet speed too.  Wednesday, November 12, 2014:  Internet porn is all-pervasive over the online space and putting a complete full-stop to it is almost impossible. But the Indian government is not in a mood to comply with the word 'impossible', it seems. The government has planned to create a list of pornography sites first, highlighting those which deal with child porn. The list will be shared with Internet service providers (ISPs) so that these sites are immediately blocked. There is a wide chance that if blocking takes place on a large volume, then it may affect Internet speed too. To avoid such inconvenience, service providers have been asked to improve their infrastructure too. The list will be prepared by the Internet and Mobile Association of India. Back in September, Telecom and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad chaired a meeting with top government officials and discussed the “problem of porn”. Departments related to IT and telecom have been asked to collaborate with each other so that ISP level's “blocking infrastructure” is boosted further. Recently a Supreme Court directive asked the government to place the issue of pornography before the Cyber Regulation Advisory Committee. The apex court of the country is presently hearing a petition filed by advocate Kamlesh Vasvani, who has filed a petition so that porn is banned in this country to prevent sexual crimes on women like rape, molestation and other forms of sexual harassment. Prasanth Sugathan, counsel for the Software Freedom Law Centre, was not in favour of filtering porn content as, according to him, such blocking has remained ineffective in countries like U.K. But in China such blocking has been strictly implemented and people over there monitor such content with utter dedication. Anyhow, blocking porn content completely will be a challenging task by all means. Indian Computer Emergency Response Team's estimate reveals there are more than 40 million porn websites across the globe and most of them, if operated outside India, are legal. But blocking porn sites are not very effective till date. In 2009, the Indian government banned a site which had porn content, but still the site is accessible. Blocking pornography is tough when “https” protocol is used, which encrypts data transmission. As far as Internet speed is concerned, India has lowest average Internet speed among most of the Internet using countries. Telecom secretary Rakesh Garg pointed out that if ISP infrastructure is not improved, then large-scale website blocking will have negative impact on Internet speed. The Cyber Regulation Advisory Committee is a team of minister for information technology and top officials from the ministries like legal affairs, commerce, home affairs, defence and the Central Bureau of Investigation. Representatives from non-government bodies such as Nasscom and Confederation of Indian Industry and Federation of the Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry are also part of the committee. The government has also suggested that NGOs also need to play a crucial role to generate awareness about the negative effects of porn.