Category Archives: India

#IMWeekly: September 23, 2013

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Bangladesh
Late last month, Bangladesh’s Ministry of Law approved several amendments to the country’s ICT Act that, among other changes, make posting “fake and obscene” material online illegal. Human rights activists, worried that the amendments will lead to an increase in politically motivated arrests of bloggers and others (earlier this year, the government established a special committee to identify Internet users deemed to be “anti-Muslim”), are urging Parliament not to approve new version of the Act.

Brazil
Brazil is considering requiring Internet companies to host data collected locally on servers located in Brazil. The proposed amendment to the country’s draft Marco Civil bill is widely seen as part of a backlash against PRISM and other US surveillance programs. The amendment is intended to protect the privacy of Brazilian Internet users, but some experts are worried that, because Brazil currently lacks specific data protection laws, a new local data storage policy may actually put privacy at risk.

India
The Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, a state in northern India, is blaming social media for instigating religious riots in the town of Muzaffarnagar earlier this month. The riots, in which at least 50 were killed and tens of thousands displaced from their homes, were sparked by the murder of three young men involved in a dispute about the harassment of a young woman. They escalated quickly, allegedly inflamed by local politicians intent on manipulating religious tensions for their own gain. Last week, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister stated at a press conference that social media was used to spread misinformation and hate speech and called for censorship to prevent further bloodshed.

#imweekly is a regular round-up of news about Internet content controls and activity around the world. To subscribe via RSS, click here.

Facebook Transparency Report: US and India lead in data requests

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Earlier this week, Facebook joined Google, Twitter, and other tech companies in issuing a transparency report: in Facebook’s case, aggregated counts of the government data requests it received in the first six months of 2013.

The United States leads the world in requests, with 11,000-12,000 requests covering somewhere between 20,000 and 21,000 user accounts. The US is also the only country on Facebook’s list without exact figures; the company notes that it has “reported the numbers for all criminal and national security requests to the maximum extent permitted by law” and will published updated figures as soon it obtains legal authorization.

Trailing the United States, with 3245 total requests covering 4144 users, is India, a country that has also ranked high in Google’s Transparency Report. The UK, Germany, and Italy round out the top five.

In countries with more than 100 requests, Taiwan received the greatest compliance from Facebook, with 84 percent of requests resulting in at least some data. The United States followed closely behind, with Facebook complying or partially complying with 79 percent of requests.

The current transparency report reveals only numbers—unlike in the Google and Twitter reports, no information on the types or forms of data requests is provided. Without this information, it’s impossible to tell how many of these requests are related to criminal activity such as robberies or kidnappings (two examples provided by Facebook) and how many are related to broader surveillance programs.

Is the Internet for Porn?

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Warning posted at Indian Cybercafe: credit Kaustav Bhattacharya/Flickr

Last week, the Indian government made the controversial decision to ban several websites that allow users to share porn online. While watching pornography is not illegal in India (except child pornography), the decision has required Internet service providers to block 39 websites, most of them web forums used mainly to share and store non-pornographic files. The decision has been criticized as being an overreach by the government and as demonstrating the government’s interest in regulating what people watch on the Web.

The decision is strikingly reminiscent of a similar decision made by the Chinese government in 2004. China required ISPs and websites to sign a self-disciplinary act to stamp out online pornography, and the government shut down 700 sites, arresting more than 200 people in connection with online porn. In an odd reversal of position, during the 2010 anniversary of the Tienanmen Square protests, China suddenly unblocked thousands of porn sites. Some speculated the government unblocked the sites to calm some of the discontent felt by citizens and distract them from any possible political action.China may have been onto something in using online porn to prevent riots in the street. Last week on Monday night, during the final game of the Stanley Cup, statisticians at the adult website Pornhub kept hour-by-hour tabs on incoming traffic to their site. After the Boston Bruins were defeated by the Chicago Blackhawks, Pornhub noticed a 21% spike in traffic incoming from Boston after the game, with significantly below average traffic coming from Chicago. While Chicagoans were celebrating winning their first Stanley Cup in four years, some Boston fans consoled themselves online.

courtesy of PornHub

Regulating Internet pornography has been an issue in the United States since the advent of the World Wide Web, something made explicit in the short-lived 1996 Communications Decency Act. The issue of Internet pornography recently reappeared in Congress during the December 2011 debates over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) when Rep. Jared Polis entered the lyrics from a popular YouTube clip into the official record. The lyrics came from Avenue Q, a musical parody of Sesame Street, in which a woman tries to explain the Internet to a group of puppets. The clip—titled “The Internet is For Porn”—went viral on YouTube. During the charged debate, Polis declared that “a high percentage” of the Internet is used for porn and labeled the Web “a pornographer’s wet dream!”

Statistics differ on how much of the Internet is devoted to porn. In 2011, Forbes estimated that approximately 4% of the world’s websites are devoted to porn, but other estimates suggest that at least one third of all online traffic is pornography. Additionally, an ExtremeTech article last year found that the porn site YouPorn hosts over 100TB of porn and serves up an average of 950 terabytes of data transfer each day. Based on the number of visits, the largest porn site on the web, Xvideos, receives approximately 4.4 billion page views per month (which is three times the size of ESPN or CNN and double Reddit’s traffic) and streams the equivalent of 10 dual-layer DVDs every second. And while most websites are lucky to keep viewers for 3-6 minutes per visit, porn sites average 15-20 minutes per visit.

courtesy of TheNicestGuy/Flickr

Porn has a long history with digital technologies and has been part of the Internet from the beginning. Before the World Wide Web, pornographic images had been sent over the Internet as ASCII art, which consisted of pictures composed of 95 keyboard characters to form a text based visual composition. Usenet groups made sharing images over the narrow bandwidth of the 1990s possible. These images were often scans of adult magazines, which could be downloaded for free, and anonymously. Even earlier, researchers developing digital scanning and laying the foundations for the JPEG format in the 1970s—funded by the Pentagon in connection with the Internet predecessor ARPANET—scanned a copy of Lena Söderberg’s 1972 Playboy photo shoot. In 1997, Söderberg was even invited to be a special guest at the 50th anniversary of conference of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology in Boston. The ubiquity of her electronic photograph has earned her the title of “first lady of the Internet” from the BBC.

Among other things, the porn industry has played a key role in many innovations on the Internet that have become staples of the everyday online experience, including online payment systems, spam, streaming content, malware, live chat, pop-ups, traffic optimization, affiliate marketing, and geo-location software. In the 1990s, Penthouse magazine sponsored the development of broadband by giving away free modems.

anaazurz/Flickr

Outside of technological innovations, online porn has also caused some social innovations. Recognizing the appeal of online pornography, a Norwegian nonprofit organization called F*ck for Forest became the first eco-porn organization, raising money for rain forest protection by selling online porn it produces.

Online pornography has also influenced the development of electronic censorship and circumvention tools designed to get around censorship. In response to the Indian government’s recent decision to block porn sites, the director of the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangladore, Suni Abraham, argued “I have traveled to China and Middle East and have seen that people access pornographic websites using various web tools. In fact, by banning websites the governments have made it more alluring for users to watch and access pornography.” Governments clearly have an interest in regulating pornography, especially when its production or distribution takes advantage of vulnerable populations like children, but broadly blocking access to online porn may cause governments more trouble than it’s worth. The Internet is widely thought of as a tool for education, economic development, and civic engagement. Given the history of online pornography, it may be worth reconsidering the idea that the Internet really is, and maybe always has been, for porn.