In a digital world that can often seem borderless and ungoverned, the Indian government has forced an emergency stop on one of the most extensive and most rapidly expanding parts of the web. United Home Minister Amit Shah, meanwhile, told a parliamentary panel about a chilling statistic: More than 805 mobile applications and more than 3,000 specific web links have been blocked. This is not mere maintenance; this is a precision strike against an expansive network of cyber-fraud and national security threats.
The Mechanism of the Ban
Who is the delete button on the internet? In India, that burden falls in large part on the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), as it is known. Consider I4C as the country’s immune system. It continually scans for viruses — in this instance, predatory apps and malicious links — and creates antibodies (a.k.a. blocking orders) to neutralize them.
The logic for the bans comes from Section 69A of the IT Act, which gives the government the “power to issue directions for blockade of information.” Though the names of the 805 apps were not broken out in the summary, past practices suggest a mix of predatory loan apps, betting platforms linked to money laundering, and utility apps created to quietly capture user information and transmit it from servers located in nations hostile to our own.
The Fraud Connection
“National Security” may sound like the stuff of espionage; however, on a day-to-day basis, it is down-and-dirty and hits Joe Public right where he lives. Many of these entities that were blocked appear to have been involved in financial fraud.
Just picture a loan app that gives you fast money and starts hacking into your contacts, harassing family members for payment. Alternatively, a gambling site that is fixed to ensure you can never withdraw your winnings. These are not real businesses; they are digital traps. “By shutting down the links and the apps, the government is literally disconnecting the phone lines of these criminal syndicates,” Ms. Kannan said. If users cannot reach the server, the scam is dead.
The Cat and Mouse Game
This is no triumph, however. Reference content is constant, but the internet is liquid. As soon as one such rogue website is removed, two more are apt to appear – with slightly different URLs in a game known as “whack-a-mole.” The I4C revelation reveals the enormity of the fight. It is a herculean task to block 3,266 links and would require continuous surveillance and real-time information gathering.
There, for the user at least, lies a tantalizing morsel of neat irony; “walled garden… ok, well that one is out the window”. However, just because there is a link does not mean it is benign. The government’s wall is high, but users remain the gatekeepers of their own devices, and paramount among considerations is a vigilant attention to downloading only trustworthy software from trusted sources. This is the digital equivalent of a cleaning operation: clearing out the debris that clogs the safety of the national network.
