Thursday, 4 July 2013
The Indian government has ordered Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block as many as 39 websites hosting obscene content. The order comes in the wake of a petition filed by Indore based advocate Kamlesh Vaswani that says watching obscene videos is not an offence but is among major reasons behind crime against women.
A bench headed by Chief Justice
Altamas Kabir issued notices to ministries of Information and
Technology, Information and Broadcasting and Home Affairs, and Internet
Service Providers Association of India over the petition. Department of Telecom in its June
13 order says: "It has been decided to immediately block the access to
the following urls (website links). Kindly do not mention the name of
URLs in the compliance letter.”
Responding to the government order, President of Internet Service
Providers Association of India Rajesh Charia says: "Effective way of
blocking as per DoT's directive is to block the content at origin by
respective data centre or content owner if content is hosted in
country... if content is hosted outside India, then it should be blocked
at international gateway of cable landing stations."
