The government crackdown on the Net continued, despite the assurances to the contrary by the ministers concerned with communications ministry ordering blocking of as many as 39 sites that host and allow their users to share obscene content. Providing specific names of the 39 websites, the department of telecom in a June 13 order asked Internet service providers to block 39 sites saying: "It has been decided to immediately block the access to the following URLs (website links) but kindly do not mention the name of URLs in the compliance letter."
An official of the communications ministry said, "we have just followed a Supreme Court order and asked ISPs to comply with it." In April, a bench headed by chief justice Altamas Kabir had issued notices to the home, IT and I&B ministries, and also to the Internet Service Providers Association of India on a petition seeking to bring an anti-pornography law. The petition filed by Indore-based advocate Kamlesh Vaswani said watching obscene videos is not an offence but it is one of the major causes for crime against women.
The petition said that absence of Internet laws encourage people to watch obscene videos and as it is not an offence, over 20 crore such videos or clippings are freely available in the market, which are being directly downloaded through the Internet or accessed via video CDs. Reacting to the development, president of Internet Service Providers Association of India Rajesh Charia said, "effective way of blocking as per DoT 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 the country, then it should be blocked at international gateway of cable landing stations."
