The government is exploring ways to to block social media applications such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.
The Department of Telecom, in a notice issued to all major industry stakeholders said it wants to explore the option of blocking these apps under the directions of the Cyber Law Division of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).
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“Issues have been raised by the Ministry of Electronics and IT and law enforcement agencies around blocking of certain mobile apps like Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram etc to meet requirement under Section 69A of IT Act,” the department said in the letter dated July 18, without stating a reason for doing so.
“This issue was also raised during the meeting on July 4, 2018, wherein technical inputs were sought from TSPs/ISPs to explore possibility of certain mobile applications,” the letter said.
The July 4 meeting, according to an industry representative present, was mainly on putting a stop to child abuse/pornography and to curb the spread of fake news. An industry source said the discussions centred around blocking these applications in an emergency, rather than blocking access to the Internet as a whole. “For example, in Jammu & Kashmir, we have Internet blackout. So, there was a discussion on whether just some social media applications could be blocked instead.”
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According to The Hindu BusinessLine a source, said that there is no move to block any apps. “MeitY has informed DoT that blocking such apps during emergency situations is difficult as they work through multiple IP addresses and on different protocols, and hence there is a need for a reasonable good solution to protect national security,” the source said. “Being the licensing authority, DoT has initiated the discussion based on a letter received from the Group Coordinator, Cyber Law Division (MeitY) during the second week of July,” the source added.
The DoT already has powers to block websites /URLs especially if the content is anti-social or pornographic. However, with a lot of unwanted content now finding its way to users through social media platforms, policy makers are in a quandary over how to deal with it.
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