Yes, another venture to control the adult websites from the country, Nepal Telecommunications Authority (NTA) has ordered all the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Nepal. Few years ago there was a similar blocking purposed but later it was relaxed, why??? (we don’t know nor do the officials have answers.)
It seems like our information and communication experts need extreme update on their knowledge. When will they know that blocking Facebook in the whole country will increase the productivity of the Government Offices (a big nuisance?) This time all the 45 ISPs of the country are ordered to block all the major (???) adult websites which include those operated illegally from the country as well.
This blocking is so immaturely done that they have blocked some major websites for information, communication, news and sharing sites. They have blocked whole range of Google’s Blogger (*.blogspot.com sites) which means around 12thousand of Nepalese blogs hosted in blogspot will no longer be accessed inside the country. The authorities should learn to block only those sites which adhere to their policies.
Huffingtonpost.com, sfsi.org, blogspot.com, springer.com are some of those we tested before writing this article. Though NTA said that on their initial phase just 60 porn sites would be blocked, and that would only consist of the websites (URL) provided by web users (and the question remains who will report that blogspot or Huffingtonpost is an adult site???)
Sometimes before, many rumors about blocking Social Networking Sites like Facebook was heard for the reason of blocking being the misuse of internet in Governmental offices. However, the rumor remained rumor.
What we find even more noisy is that major news websites of the country are freely advertising those so called blocked-adult sites in their websites? Nepal still remains backward no matter how much private organization do for the IT development. Authorities should learn to execute the exactness of being correct.
