Well, we saw this coming. The ISP Association of India has sent a letter to the Indian government, saying that ISPs are "free not to disable any of the 857 URLs, as given in the list, which do not have child pornographic content", is vague and un-implementable. Mint had also reported on the content of this letter yesterday. While the ISPAI says that it is "totally against Online Child Pornography as well as Abuse on Women", they will continue to block the 857 URLs because they do not have any control over the content on those websites, given that the "content owner can change the content any moment without any information to ISPs", and ISPs have no mechanism to check the content. As we'd mentioned earlier, the government of India hasn't unblocked the content: it's merely asked ISPs to decide whether they want to unblock it or not after checking if the sites have child porn or not. The ISPs, unwilling to take on the liability of checking for the content, have passed the buck back to the DoT. It was a ridiculous and ridiculously worded directive from the DoT anyway. The letter the ISPs have sent to the DoT Dear Sir, This has reference to directive dated 31st July 2015 for disabling 857 URL’s and list given and subsequent directive dated 4.8.2015 stating “to communicate to all intermediaries (ISPs) that the intermediaries (ISPs) are hereby directed that they are free not to disable any of the 857 URLs, as…
