Indian Govt & Courts block close to 4,000 internet urls in 2016 & 2017

The central government blocked 1,791 urls — websites or pages — and the courts blocked another 2,133 urls in 2016 and 2017, the department of telecom said.

This was in addition to around 4,700 child pornography websites that were blocked as part of a CBI investigation.

All content blocks on the internet are put in place according to Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 by the Cyber Law Division of Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology.

The government did not give a list of the blocked urls.

Earlier this month, Facebook said it restricted access to 1,228 content in response to legal requests from law enforcement agencies in India.

“The majority of content restricted was alleged to violate local laws relating to defamation of religion and hate speech,” Facebook said.

The government and law enforcement agencies also requested for some information on 13,752 user accounts, Facebook said. The social network produced “some data” in 54% of the cases in the January-June 2017 period.