The Department of Telecommunications banned 67 porn websites under the new (IT) Rules

Access to around 67 pornographic websites has been blocked following the orders issued by The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) under the new Information Technology (IT) Rules. While Internet service providers (ISPs) are now bound to submit a compliance report of the matter, the access to the websites on user’s phones and laptops would be blocked by diktat.

Total 67 websites that are mentioned in a circular posted on the DoT website were banned. While 63 out of this was banned by central government the rest 4 were banned in support of an order issued by the Uttarakhand High Court (HC) and directions issued by the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY).

The following is written in the order “Kindly find the attached Judicial Magistrate First Class, Court No.6, Pune, Maharashtra order dated 23-09-2022, in the case OW No. 303 of 2022 forwarded by MeitY vide email dated 24.09.2022 for necessary action with respect following sixty-three (63) websites/URLs mentioned in the court order”.

The new IT Rules, 2021 empowers the government to ban such websites which profess nudity. The 3(2)(b) of the IT Rules Act bars content that ‘shows such individual in full or partial nudity or shows or depicts such individual in any sexual act or conduct’. Though this act actually deals with revenge porn, however numerous unrelated sites are mentioned in the circular that were banned under this rule.

Earlier also such a ban was imposed on 827 porn websites. This action was implemented as per the orders of Uttrakhand High Court in 2018. It must be noted that the court had issued an order of banning a total of 857 websites. 30 websites sustained out of the ban as the central government was unable to find any adult content in this websites.