New Delhi, August 5 2015: Like good cholesterol and bad cholesterol, perhaps there is good pornography and bad pornography? Only days after forcing Indian Internet service providers to shut access to over 800 deemed pornographic sites, the Indian government back tracked, yesteday, restricting its gag order to child pornographic sites.
A new order says: "The intermediaries (ISPs) are hereby directed that they are free not to disable any of the 857 URLs... which do not have child pornographic content."
The Ministry of Communications and Information and Technology, in its order of July 31 under section 79(3)(b) of the IT Act 2000, had banned the 857 websites "as the content hosted on these websites related to morality, decency as given in Article 19(2) of the Constitution of India." This sweeping net trawled many humour sites with no pornography.
It is believed, for the omnibus gag, government went by the list of so-called pornography websites provided by plaintiffs in a case currently before the Supreme Court, without examining it too closely.