Ban on access to porn over the Net in the Ph to start this month

If things work according to plan, devices and networks accessing the Internet through Philippine Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will supposedly be porn-free this month. Yugatech.com reports this is a move initiated by the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) to comply with Republic Act 9775 or the “Anti-Child Pornography Act of 2009″…

With the implementation of the rules and regulations, ISPs will have to install carrier-grade monitoring programs to identify and filter out porn content. This could include websites and blogs that publishes porn content, video streaming services that allows uploading and viewing of pornographic video, file sharing sites and webcam services that facilitates the same.

internet_securityThe report headline, however, may be misleading as it is not really all forms of porn that will be banned in the Philippines but only porn involving children, consistent with the scope of RA 9775. The wording of the guidelines do not seem clear, however, as some sentences in the text refer to just “pornography” and others refer to “child pornography” as if they were interchangeable.

Created under RA 9775 is the Inter-Agency Council against Child Pornography (IACACP). Under the new NTC guidelines, the IACACP will be overseeing the implementation of all of the above measures.

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The NTC shall furnish ISPs with a list of the pornographic websites provided by the IACACP for their immediate blocking. Thereafter, the ISPs must submit to the IACACP within 5 days from the end of each month, a list of all the websites that were blocked, which subscribers attempted to access. In addition, they must inform the Philippine National Police or the National Bureau of Investigation of any form of child pornography committed using their services or facilities, within 7 days from obtaining such facts and circumstances. Thus, for purposes of investigation and prosecution by the concerned authorities, all ISPs must preserve their customers’ data record particularly the time, origin and destination of access.

There is also no clarity, however, on how the IACACP will apply these guidelines to monitor and control the use of general Internet-based communications services like Skype and Yahoo Messenger (among others) where voice and videos of activity banned under these laws and guidelines could be streamed in real time.

Many freedom of speech and privacy advocates are concerned that these developments may herald the onset of state-sanctioned spying on private communications over the Net. The Philippines however is widely regarded in international law enforcement circles as one of a handful of countries in East Asia where such nefarious crimes flourish and, as such, such concerns may pale in this context.

19 Replies to “Ban on access to porn over the Net in the Ph to start this month”

  1. Noynoy is acting like a true Christian. What follower of Christ would tolerate pornography that ruins the moral fiber of society? There is a saying that for evil men to prevail all they need is that all good men do nothing. Say NO to porn. Stand up to evil and practice the teachings of Jesus Christ.

    1. ever heard of the story about the Trojan Horse?

      filters can be used to flag your bank accounts too, and anything you did on that session, including your username and password. so who will guard them to make they do not do such things? are we to give our trust that they would honor our privacy?

      this very thing already reeks of invasion of privacy. let’s not use God as an excuse for them to take it away from internet users.

    2. Is this satire? It’s really a well made satire statement if it was. Otherwise, no get the f out of my internet.

    3. Wow. Shove a Bible up your ass.

      Now that that is out of the way, let me tell you that this move is merely “PAKITANG TAO”, i.e. pandering to the Church and its followers, and in the future will be used as an excuse for monitoring our activities, especially political ones such as forums and whistleblowers. If one wants to get rid of child porn, one should do so proactively. Educate the masses. CLEAN UP THE GODDAMNED TV NETWORKS OF OVERROMANTICIZED BULLSHIT LIKE TELESERYES AND NOONTIME DEBAUCHERY SHOWS. Those things are one of the biggest roadblocks to our moral transcendence. Put the likes of A-BS-CBN AND GAGONG Media Arts out of business. You look for moral fiber in this society and yet you probably sodomize yourself with the closest phallic object on hand when you see the KalyeSerye title card flash across the screen (Or maybe you just tear off a Bible page to roll it up and smoke it like a joint.). Fix yourself first before you preach hypocrite. (Also, the RCC still hasn’t compensated jack shit for their priests molesting altar boys worldwide.)

      This is M, signing out. And once again, V(H)ic(k)tory for Christ, shove a Bible up your ass.

      None shall speak with a free tongue. None shall walk without a chain. Every man will have his mark, so too will their children. Each will have three eyes, one shows walls they could never break, another shows the hell ahead. The last one will never close and it will always gaze back at them.

      Freedom of Speech RIP

  2. Hmm..I don’t know if I may be oversimplifying it but there is another approach to blocking such webpages.

    It is via
    1) domain based blocking (you would need a specific source address/webpage in mind for this) So say you wanted to block content from http://www.xxx.com, then you block xxx.com via a domain filter by in putting in your servers that traffic request for such a link is not allowed. Hence, the websites and any page within that domain/url is blocked.

    2) the other is a url filter. You can be as vague here but to simplify it, you could say block the word “cock”. The server would filter urls with an instance of the sequence “cock” within it. http://www.google.com is allowed, however, url of say http://www.google.com/cock is not allowed.

    Number 1 is more specific but means you need to specifically know of the address in question.

    Number 2 is a bit more general and like my example, the word “cock” could be used for genitalia or just a male chicken. It would not discriminate between the two and the filtering is done automatically.

    Both of these do not require you to invade the privacy of sifting thru webpages visited by every user as it is done automatically.

    I also don’t think google ads would necessitate blocking any webpage as only the ad will be blocked and it would not load if it requested a link from a blocked/filtered site.

    The most specific type of blocking is and ip filter similar to what happened with eztv website last month. any page request to that specific ip is automatically stopped. That is why eztv had to repeatedly transfer servers to change their IP address. I’m not sure if redirecting request managed to work for them if the original ip is being blocked (I know that doesn’t work).

    My two cents.

  3. I am curious as to why they would need to request for list of people who are trying to access the links of banned urls/links.

    If the person could not access the page, there is technically no act of actually viewing the site.

    Secondly, there are instances wherein you accidentally click a link/misleading email/post (what have you) and it redirects you to a page you don’t really want to go to.

    Just block it, that’s fine. To ask for anything more than that to conceive of a crime being committed is another thing.

  4. “Anti-Child Pornography Act of 2009″ sounds good but how could the ISP filter child from adult porno? What will happen here is blanket censorship. Unless the PH declares all porn as illegal, then this is just one of those slogan, “I wanna look good” laws

  5. It’s a waste of time…those providers have no means to ban child pornography. If the business is flourishing; and being banned by thr government. Then, criminal elements, like the Japanese Yakuza, Chinese Triad, American Mafia;etc…will be in it. Like the drug and flesh trades. There are many laws to stop it…yet it contonues. Look at the Liqour prohibition in U.S. There was a ban against liqour. However, the Mafia, moonshiners, etc… took over. And, people still had a good time drinking liqour, gambling, prostitution, etc…

  6. This may sound good.

    But then, they should have a ban first on idiotic and moronic TV shows, movies telenovelas, news, etc., which really contributes in a larger scale the degradation of the country’s moral fiber. Hah, that would put the idiotic networks out of business!

    After all, if you have a population with a very good sense of moral fiber then it would translate to less demand for porn.

  7. Hay nako. Di nga nila ma-censor ang mainstream TV, hinde nga mahuli-huli ang mga mga smut tabloids then how in the world will they censor the internet? Damn retarded Filipino officials!

  8. I remember when they first started putting filters on the internet back in DLS-CSB.

    For the first few months, all of 4chan’s boards were banned for “porn” except the ones that were actually about porn. WHOOPS!

  9. Well, assuming that our government is really doing a good job of hunting down people who exploit children for sexual purposes, why is it that there is still a large number of these cases? POVERTY! ‘Nuff said…..

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