Road Blocked!

alt="https://img-cdn.thepublive.com/filters:format(webp)/vnd/media/post_attachments/be256b3985db05b78f404ba6ccce81ee72add479ea5a9ca3c720e3d92cd938ea.gif (18266 bytes)" align="right">

"Full stop" for phone sex
service. As VSNL, the international telephony provider, has blocked access to some
international sex numbers from India. It was not an overnight effort. DoT and MTNL, which
had taken cognizance of such numbers for sometime, had been requesting VSNL to tackle this
for some time now. Finally, this has come through. And it is for the first time that a
central cabinet minister announced the decision in a news conference.

Nobody needs a guessing for the reason.
"Stopping poisoning adolescent minds," said Sushma Swaraj, the union
communications minister. Or is it, as media reports allege, an action triggered by
shooting bills especially from the government offices across the country. Steps to check
this, if reports are true, are not a mean step either. What is more important is the act
of checking and implementation. VSNL has set up a special cell which will scan newspapers
and identify such numbers—usually which change to some other number once they get
blocked—and monitor the blockage process.

Kudos to the effort. But
what would be the sign board? "Road Blocked, No Diversion Please" or "Road
Diverted"! The latter is a possibility, especially when porno is being easily
accessed at a much lower cost through Internet. "The stop poisoning of adolescent
minds" on the WWW medium ... is there a way out!

alt="https://img-cdn.thepublive.com/filters:format(webp)/vnd/media/post_attachments/f778dccc291c5cc373375aad957dbb9c6fd54e8ee93c27a18bc48e844a02179a.gif (15105 bytes)"> alt="https://img-cdn.thepublive.com/filters:format(webp)/vnd/media/post_attachments/b6195e04af751df7f2304469f548a2ea4e146bbe7bb8d0a4c0f0b325f9f81718.gif (16213 bytes)"> alt="https://img-cdn.thepublive.com/filters:format(webp)/vnd/media/post_attachments/124d611825c629f1aaad6cb662d6a4a3cebb106a9cff78e86b3afe8ddc30d9dd.gif (15404 bytes)">

color="#000000">E-commerce transactions by the year 2002 are expected to be worth $400 billion. The $400 billion business on-line by 2002 would equal a 1997-2002 compound annual growth rate of 103 percent. Number of people with access to WWW in the same timeframe are expected to be 320 million.