KATHMANDU, Oct 8: Although a notice is likely to be issued regarding the government´s decision to ban pornography in a week´s time, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) doubt if such a move would be practical possibility.
As per the government decision, cyber cafes will now need to take permission from the District Administrative Offices (DEO) before starting their operations.
They will also be asked to maintain record of users´ login and logout time. The cafes will be monitored by representatives from DAO, District Tax Office, Nepal Police and local IT professional recommended by DAO, the source said.
Following an appeal from the Home Ministry, Nepal Telecommunications Authority (NTA) has been working with ISPs and telecom operators to ban sites that have pornographic contents.
Internet Service Providers Association of Nepal (ISPAN) has said they needed to install firewall and filtering software to block pornographic sites. The filtering software costs anything between US $100,000 to a million dollar, said ISPAN President Binay Bohora. Hence effective implementation of the government decision would be a tall order for the ISPs, he added.
At present there are more than 260 million pages of porn sites on the internet. According to Google, this is seven percent of the 3.3 billion pages on the web. Furthermore, Pornography Time Statistics (see below) shows that every second 28,258 internet users are viewing pornographic contents over the internet.
“We can´t completely ban these sites. However, we can reduce the increasing trend where youths spend most of the time on the internet watching porn,” said NTA Spokesperson Kailash Prasad Neupane. After the porn sites are banned, Neupane believes that internet users will spend time doing research and creative works on the web.
NTA has asked ISPs to ban porn sites that they know of, but ISPs are not sure where and how to start. “We are service providers and cannot ban sites on our own,” Om Bikram Thapa, Chief Technical Officer, ISPAN said.
Pornography Statistics
Every second $3,075.64 is being spent on pornography.
Every second 28,258 internet users are viewing pornography.
Every second 372 internet users are typing adult search terms into search engines.
Every 39 minutes a new pornographic video is being created in the United States.
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Its very simple,just use content filtering. If all the ISP uses it then they can filter anything they want, like porn, gambling, terrorists linked websites... anything.
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