Lok Sabha Question No. 678 (UNSTARRED), answered on 2015-12-02
Subject: Regulation of Content over Internet
Ministry: COMMUNICATIONS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Asked by: VIJAY KUMAR HANSDAK

## GOVERNMENT OF INDIA MINISTRY OF COMMUNICATIONS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRONICS & INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY)

## LOK SABHA UNSTARRED QUESTION NO. 678

TO BE ANSWERED ON: 02.12.2015

## REGULATION OF CONTENT  OVER INTERNET

## 678  SHRI VIJAY KUMAR HANSDAK:

Will the Minister of Communications & Information Technology be pleased to state: -

- (a) whether the Cyber Regulation Advisory  Committee has recently been assigned the task of preparing a list of  pornographic websites and blocking them;
- (b) if so, the details thereof and the reasons therefor;
- (c) whether the said  task has been assigned to a private company instead of any government  agency and if so, the  reasons  therefor; and
- (d) the  measures  taken  by  the  Government  to  increase  capacity    and  enhance  technical    expertise    of government agencies in order to monitor  and block such sites?

## ANSWER

## MINISTER FOR COMMUNICATIONS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY (SHRI RAVI SHANKAR PRASAD)

(a) to (c):   In a Writ Petition in the matter of Kamlesh Vaswani vs. Union of India, the Hon'ble Supreme Court in its order dated 29.8.2014 directed that it would be appropriate if the Government places the copy of  the  writ  petition  and  interlocutory  applications  before  the  Cyber  Regulation  Advisory  Committee (CRAC),  which  has  members  from  all  sections  of  the  Society  including  Government,  Industry,  Civil Society and Academy, for its consideration.  Accordingly, the CRAC meeting was held on 5 th September 2014 to discuss issues relating to availability of pornography material on the Internet and filtering of the same by the service providers in the country.  CRAC requested Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI),  an  association  of  members  from  content  providers  to  lead  the  effort  as  part  of  Social responsibility, to collect and maintain the repository of blacklisted pornography sites from various sources including  list  of  child  pornography  sites  maintained  by  other  countries.    With  a  view  to  get  a  list  of objectionable sites, CRAC recommended   IAMAI  to enable government to  initiate further appropriate action on such sites.  Similar approach is adopted by other countries like Australia, United Kingdom and Unites  States  of  America,  where  the  Governments  are  working  with  Non-Government  Organizations (NGOs) to deal with the issue of pornography.

In  order to  effectively  deal  with  Online Child  Pornographic  contents, Government has already initiated steps  towards  devising  a  mechanism  to  securely  access  INTERPOL's  'Worst-of-List'  through  Central

Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which is the National Nodal Point for INTERPOL related activities in the country,    and  disable  access  to  such  content  on  the  web  with  the  involvement  and  co-operation  of  all stakeholders concerned in the country.

(d):  The filtering of web sites with obscene / objectionable content poses significant technical challenge. These websites keep on changing the names, domain addresses and hosting platforms from time to time making it difficult to filter or block such websites using technical tools available in the market.  Further 'https'  websites  with  encrypted  contents  are  used  to  transmit  the  pornographic  content  which  makes filtering difficult as the data is encrypted.  Therefore, the tools provide filtering to a limited extent only. The tools, in the process may also filter genuine content and degrade the performance of systems.

To  address  the  issues  effectively,  Government  is  in  regular  touch  with  Internet  Service  Providers  to upgrade  their  infrastructure  and  technology  to  effectively  address  the  shortcomings  with  regard  to identifying and blocking encrypted websites / URLs.  Further, Social Networking sites are monitored by the security agencies in order to check / remove objectionable contents from the web sites in consultation with  Indian  Computer  Emergency  Team  (CERT-In)  in  accordance  with  the  provisions  of  Information Technology Act, 2000. Government is in regular touch with Social Networking sites, having their offices in India, to disable objectionable contents at the source from their websites.  Government has also initiated Research and Development programmes to deal with technical issues relating to encrypted communications from the point of monitoring and blocking.

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