Special adult packages that come with a password for Internet users who wish to access adult sites while the family packages will be filtered to block access to these sites will be soon offered, Director General (DG) of the Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (TRC) Priyantha Kariyapperuma told The Sunday Times FT.

This was decided following a meeting held on August 11 between the TRC and Internet Service Providers (ISP) to discuss the implementation of the TRC directive issued on August 1. The directive was issued on the orders of the President to filter out all obscene and pornographic content on the Internet so that young children cannot access them. The rates for these packages will be finalized by the ISPs after consultations with the TRC.

Any ISP violating a TRC directive can have its license revoked, but according to the DG everyone agreed to implement this measure and most ISPs are already working on doing what they can to filter sites with pornographic content. “The identified famous sites will be blocked first and the TRC will look to see what sort of technical assistance can be provided to assist in this,” Mr. Kariyapperuma added.“This is not something new,” he said adding that Middle Eastern countries and even India and China have this sort of restriction in place.

SLT, Sri Lanka’s largest ISP, said they currently have a special package where certain sites are blocked and entry requires authentication that parents can obtain to prevent children from accessing adult sites, an SLT official said. “This is where access is open but on computers with this package, certain sites are blocked,” the official said, explaining that the TRC directive requires all adult sites will be blocked and will be open on request after authentication.

“The current package was not planned for such a large subscriber base,” he said, adding that if it is to be expanded it will affect the browsing speeds. To prevent this while the directive is being implemented, the system will need to be upgraded and probably even new servers will have to be put in along with new software which will trawl the Internet in search of these offensive sites.

While access to these sites by regular users can be blocked, this measure will not be effective against a person who is conversant with computers, Rohith Udalagama, Managing Director of Lanka Communication Services, a local ISP, told The Sunday Times FT. Answering a question on whether the ban can be implemented 100%, he said, “There is no foolproof method to completely block them all but it depends on how the authorities expect us to implement it,” he said. “We have to do what can be done as soon as possible to implement this,” he added.

Some countries have a list of restricted sites and if the TRC can provide the ISPs with such a list it will not involve too much of work on their part, but if they have to proactively search for new sites and block it the ISPs will have to deal with an added cost. Answering questions on how the sites will be tracked, the TRC chief said that the TRC will maintain a list of restricted sites which will be provided to the ISPs and ISPs will also search for the sites and filter.

According to Mr. Udalagama while some countries in the Middle East and China have blocked access to certain sites, there are only a few ISPs in those countries and most are state controlled. In Sri Lanka the market is completely open and about 29 licences have been issued while there are about nine who are actively operating. “The added costs won’t be much of a problem for the large companies but for the smaller service providers it might be a large cost,” Mr. Udalagama said. Other industry sources who wished to remain anonymous said the only information they received about this directive is what they heard in the media and that no official communication had been sent to them in this regard. Neither were they informed of the August 11 meeting, the sources said.

According to www.alexa.com a web information company which tracks traffic to sites on the Internet, nine of the 100 most-visited sites in Sri Lanka are of pornographic content with a site originating in Sri Lanka coming in at number 35. Internet penetration has grown from five percent to 25 percent in the last few years, a TRC official said. SLT currently has over 200,000 dial up customers and over 100,000 ADSL customers. (LP).