NTA and Home Ministry are preparing to put a complete block to porn sites in Nepal. Read the full news here.
While organizations like www.crisisconnectioninc.org have tried to make a connection between porn (along with drugs like Crystal Meth) and sexual violence, they have failed to show any statistical proof.
This site takes a neutral stance and tries to list all the works done against pornography. Other California based writer concludes in his article that porn actually decreases sexual violence.
We can’t take any of these reports/articles for granted though, because in a monetary world, these could be influenced by the ones who make money of porn or lack of it.
If government believes blocking adult material actually benefits the society based on the statistics (like increase in porn surfing leading to increase in sexual crimes), they should take all efforts they can make to stop it by all means. According to OHCHR report of 2007, there have been 40 (or 38, different data in different reports) cases of sexual violence that have been reported. The report also states that many cases go unreported because police may not have taken the reports of “Dalit” victims; also, many may not have reported at all due to social difficulties they might face to live as victims of sexual assaults. Government should be more concerned on making reporting and investigation anonymous and easy for victims than wasting resources in activities like banning porn without any conclusive understanding of the consequences.
Those are the issues the government is probably more aware of. They must have taken various factors into consideration to have come up such a decision. But the issue that concerns me is not the step itself but the difficulty and cost of the process. When it comes to Internet Censorship, the most talked about is China. They not only block Adult and Pornographic content, but also block various news sites, media sharing sites, blogging and several website hosting services. This is achieved by what is known as “The Golden Shield Project”, a part of “The Great Firewall of China”. The preliminary work for this project cost US $800 million. The system uses various levels of protection such as IP filtering, DNS filtering and poisoning, URL filtering, Packet filtering and Connection reset to achieve maximum filtering. However, this can still be bypassed using secure VPN, onion routing services and proxies or softwares that automatically select available proxies and change them.
The questions that have been circulating in Nepali Internet Community are:
Will it be any good?
Is it worth it?
A lot of companies have a hard time effectively blocking porn at a private residential level, let alone a country-wide level. After trying a bunch of the more widely known porn blocking softwares, I decided to try a internet based filtering service call WebFilterPro that has outperformed all of the previous companies that I’ve tried out. Maybe Nepal should give them a try?