The government has not been able to bring down porn websites in the country completely despite the multiple initiatives taken to address the matter.
Authorities say lack of technical resources has been a huge hurdle in the initiatives for a clampdown on the online pornography.
“It would have been feasible to put a stop to the websites if they were local,” Telecoms and ICT Mustafa Jabbar told Bangla Tribune.
According to him, video-sharing site YouTube was one of the biggest sources of pornography in the country.
“The community standard of YouTube clearly does not match with ours,” said Jabbar.
He added that initiatives are being taken to negotiate the community standards of YouTube after they set up offices in Bangladesh in October.
In 2010, the telecoms regulator ordered the complete shutdown of 84 websites citing them as indecent and distorted.
In early 2016, an individual wrote to the telecoms secretary detailing the psychological effect of pornography on the younger population.
Fololowing the letter, the government cracked down on porn website in December 2016 and ordered the complete shutdown of approximately another 560 sites.
“We were able to shut down almost 90 percent of those sites,” said Internet Service Provider Association of Bangladesh (ISPAB) General Secretary Imdadul Haque.
“However the rest of the 10 percent are hosted in the cloud. It’s not possible to shut them down as they operate from a different IP address everytime they are detected,” he added.
Minister Jabbar said the telecoms division is likely to launch a initiative in November in a bid to bring down the sites permanently.