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Well, kiss Orkut.com goodbye for awhile.
For anyone who hasn't been paying attention, the TRA (Telecommunications Regulatory Authority) ordered the site blocked last week after Orkut drew flack for displaying sexually explicit material.
Included among the complaints was that the site contained an area where people in Dubai could find sexual partners.
Were people really doing this?
It's the internet. Of course they were.
This isn't just any website, either, this was Orkut, which is operated by Google. According to alexa.com, a San Francisco based company that tracks internet use, Orkut ranks 8th in global traffic, which means the site sees more visitors than either eBay or Amazon.com.
To some degree, Orkut and its users brought this upon themselves. Did people actually think they could post nude pictures and no one would notice?
A large number of people still don't seem to get Web 2.0. The phenomenon allows you watch the world, but in return, the world will be watching all the stupid things you do online. And some of those people will be taking notes.
And so another website pays the fine for its users. These sites are stuck with trying to solve the dilemma of "what do you do with legitimate technology that is being perverted into other, often illegal, purposes?" It's not a new problem. The illegal uses of peer-to-peer (P2P) servers have been causing problems since Napster went online in the late '90s.
A US court recently ruled that P2P software couldn't be banned because there were legitimate commercial purposes, but social networks have their legitimate purposes, too.
Friends and family living apart often use the sites to stay involved in each others' lives, and several sites offer areas where professionals can interact. Orkut does have a policy that is supposed to combat illicit activity. Any account containing nudity is deleted.
Anything users find insulting can be reported, and if the material fails to meet certain standards, the material will be removed. In extreme cases, Orkut says the authorities will be notified. Great policy, guys. Orkut will definitely be patting itself on the back considering how flawlessly the policy works, too.
Face the facts
People need to face the facts. The internet has made many things possible. It's moved the world's libraries, cinemas, and music halls into our living rooms, but socially it's the equivalent of the Wild, Wild West and no one has yet been able to handle the job of sheriff.
What effect blocking the site will have remains to be seen. It will keep people from "inadvertently" typing the web address and then "accidentally" entering a user name and password and, er, "mistakenly" viewing illicit content.
This is provided that these people don't know how to break through etisalat's filter. The filter may manage to keep the masses off of these sites, but as many people in Dubai have discovered, getting through the filter doesn't take much effort.
Whether the TRA decides to keep a total ban, or introduce a partial ban as used on some sites, is also still unknown.
While a partial block may be welcome, or at least grudgingly accepted, by users of the site, no one is going to envy etisalat, which seems to increasingly finding itself having to track down and block every new site that creeps up.
It may seem an easy task, until you look at the numbers. There were an estimated 420 million pornographic sites as of 2005, and according to netcraft.com, over 30.9 million new sites were added to the internet last year, although how many of those contained illicit material is unknown.
That means one new website appears every second. Good luck keeping up with that.
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