For a glimpse at what modern government head-scratching looks like, one could do worse than to look at the minutes of the September 5th, 2014, meeting in New Delhi of India’s “Cyber Regulation Advisory Committee.”
The meeting had an ambitious purpose: finding a way to eliminate pornography use in India. This comes as a directive from the Supreme Court of India, in response to a petition about the dangers of pornography. From the petition itself: “Petitioner most respectfully submits that most of the offences committed against women/girls/children are fueled by pornography. … Pornography is like moral cancer that is eating our entire society at every second across [the] country.” In response, the court requested that the committee, led by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, do something about the problem.
The ministers discussed their options — and, unsurprisingly, came up with very little. For one thing, there’s the problem of demand. The Internet’s largest pornography site, Pornhub, found that India is its fifth largest audience in the world. The same statistics show that Indians average almost eight minutes and seven pages per session. Then consider the supply-side dilemma. Porn sites are accessed by Indians, but most do not operate in India. What’s more, the 40 million or so sites that host such material routinely change their IP addresses and even their names to prevent precisely the kind of blocking the Indian government would like to pursue. Add to that the encryption that sites use through “https” protocols and the proxy servers that allow a back channel past filtering, and you have a market with ample producers, eager consumers, and no regulation worth the name.
That’s not for lack of trying. The ministers ran through countless possible options. Could they freely distribute the filtering software that parents use to safeguard their children? Could they encourage US- and UK-style awareness campaigns by non-profits? Could they change the law to make watching porn itself a crime? The ministers appealed to national conscience and even national security. They invoked moral principles and discussed the desensitizing, destabilizing effects of smut. They considered the weightiest of subjects, including the “context of Indian culture” and the “cultural values of the country and sentiments of the Indian society.”
And yet, after all that back-and-forth, the ministers landed on the modern equivalent of a blacklist. The only viable option, it seems, is to make a list of sites that need blocking and then ask internet service providers to block them en masse. A worthy plan — with one small hitch. Mass blocking of some sites slows down access to all sites. So the Indian government will ask ISPs both to block sites and to upgrade their infrastructure to make up for the slower speeds. Even then, the government will have to cope with all of the workarounds that enterprising users have developed to evade such bans.
It’s easy, then, to portray the New Delhi meeting as a kind of comedy. But consider the conclusion: The government, the assembled ministers conceded, is virtually powerless. They can ask ISPs to crack down on specific sites, but that’s it. That’s the best response the government could muster after a Supreme Court petition, several years of regulatory effort, and a meeting of no fewer than nine government departments including the Central Bureau of Investigation (India’s FBI), the Ministry of Defence (India’s DoD), and the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, which, despite its awe-inspiring acronym (DeitY), proved notably less than omnipotent.
To read the minutes of this meeting is to see what happens when a modern democracy flirts with information control. And it’s also to see what happens when it reaches the limits of its ability to regulate the Internet. That’s a lesson in itself for any country looking to keep sites hidden or information away from prying eyes. But as farcical as the New Delhi meeting may have been, the joke starts to fade when we think about the option that was not seriously considered this time: outright government censorship of porn. As cyber law expert Pawan Duggal told CNBC, “The chances of a Chinese experiment being replicated in India are extremely low given our robust constitution.”
Yet, seeing that India’s web only merits a rating of “partly free” from the independent group Freedom House, it’s worth taking such reassurances with a grain of salt. Centralized methods to block pornography can also block political debate, or content that politicians deem “offensive” or “inflammatory.” The tools that might keep users away from explicit videos in one country are the same ones that, in another country, keep users away from the mention of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Remember it was only last week that China opened its first “World Internet Conference (WIC)” with a call for an open and free Internet while simultaneously censoring comments about WIC on social media and detaining student demonstrators seeking access to Facebook.
To many in the west, it’s appealing to imagine the Internet as the solvent for totalitarianism. But digital liberty, no less than its analog cousin, still demands vigilance.
Jimmy Soni is an author and former managing editor of the Huffington Post.
