Most ISPs yet to comply with Govt order blocking child porn sites

Most of the Internet Service Providers in the country are yet to comply with the Centre’s one-year-old order related to blocking websites with online Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM).

The Ministry of Electronics and IT (Meity) had passed an order last year requiring all Indian ISPs to adopt the Internet Watch Foundation’s resources to block their users from accessing URLs that host such content.

Global watchdog

IWF is a UK-based not-for-profit organisation that provides a comprehensive list of such URLs that is constantly updated. But this list is accessible only to its members. There are about 160 ISPs in India but not many of them have taken up the IWF membership.

Rajesh Chharia, President, Internet Service Providers Association of India, told BusinessLine , “We are very concerned about this issue, however the membership fees of the IWF is too high. We have advised the government to form a nodal agency and talk to get some sort of group membership from the IWF that it can then distribute to stakeholders.”

Chharia added that smaller Internet players have, meanwhile, adopted a list put out by the Interpol. A spokesperson for IWF said that the Interpol list is not as comprehensive and dynamic as IWF’s list and is at domain level only.

“At the IWF we want to continue working closely with the internet industry as we feel it is the most effective way to remove child sexual abuse imagery, and it is important for us to stay independent of government,” Jess Fleig, Press Officer at the Internet Watch Foundation, said in a written response to queries sent by BusinessLine.

Indian telcos

A top functionary at Meity said that the IWF resource is ideal and comprehensive. Rakesh Maheshwari, Senior Director, Cyber Law and e-security of the Meity, said, “We are mainly targeting the five major players that control most of the internet flow in the country. We have received compliance from all the major ISPs including Airtel, Reliance Jio, Vodafone and Tata Communication that they are all following the order. Not following the order is punishable, but since all of them are following the order we haven’t had to take any such action.”

However, other than Vodafone and Tata Communications, none of the other large operators replied to queries sent by BusinessLine in this regard. When asked if the all the large operators had indeed become members, the IWF’s spokesperson said, “We have approached those companies, rather than them approaching us, but we have had effective conversations...We’re confident all will come into membership eventually!”

Child pornography, or Child Sexual Abuse Material as it is officially called, consists of sexually abusive and violent content featuring children sometimes as young as a few months, is mostly hosted by websites outside of India with dynamic and constantly changing content that makes it extremely hard to track and block. The situation in India is particularly alarming with the second largest number of Internet users in the world as well as an increasing number of child sexual abuse cases.

The government is currently in the process of making its own list of such URLs, however, with all representatives offering differing stances, the current compliance of the law seems to be in question.

(The writer is interning at Business Line.)

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