Tonga’s domain in top five for sexual abuse material, says report [1]
Saturday, June 8, 2019 - 13:06
Tonga’s .TO domain is in the five top level domains containing child sex abuse material alongside Colombia (.CO) and Russia (.RU) as well as .COM, and .NET, according to the Internet Watch Foundation’s 2018 annual report [2], published on 25 April 2019.
Out of the 105,047 urls identified in 3,899 domains, 80% were concentrated within these top five domains with .TO listed as number five, behind .COM, .NET, .CO and .RU.
The foundation’s annual reports over the last two years however, show Tonga was not included in their top five lists.
Tonga’s .TO domain has appeared in the past on other similar reports.
Department of Information Director, Andrew To’imoana, told Matangi Tonga he was not aware of this particular report.
To remove a website, he said a court order is required “to take down a domain name for allegations of intellectual property, infringement, or the like”.
“If the name is associated with obvious criminal activity (e.g. child porn, phishing, carding) our domain admin will just take down those domains after investigating if the allegations are correct.”
The .TO ccTLD admin is Tonic, located in California, USA.
“They have readily complied with takedown requests mandated by court orders from any United States jurisdiction,” said Andrew.
“Offensive websites in Tonga can be reported to the Police first and depending on the evidence presented, they can seek for a court order and contact the local hosting company such as Digicel or TCC etc., for a takedown of the particular website.”
The Internet Watch Foundation is a charity based in the UK and works with service providers to remove child pornography and other potentially illegal content from the web.