BTRC was ordered to shut unauthorised news websites. It blocked bdnews24.com, a registered publisher

Bangladesh’s telecoms regulator has blocked top registered news publisher bdnews24.com and other news websites for one and a half hours.  

Staff Correspondentbdnews24.com
Published : 28 Sept 2021, 01:39 PM
Updated : 28 Sept 2021, 04:25 PM

Sudden outages came as Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission moved to implement a court order to shut unregistered news websites.

Readers from across Bangladesh could not access bdnews24.com since 4:45 pm on Tuesday. Some browsers notified the users that the website was blocked. Many other news websites were also unavailable.

A top official of BTRC said the agency was shutting all unregistered news websites following the High Court’s order. 

The High Court on Sept 24 ordered BTRC to shut all unregistered and unapproved online news portals within a week.

The government allowed bdnews24.com to register in November 2020 and the website received its registration certificate after completing the formalities.

More than 150 online news publishers are registered with the information ministry and many of them faced outages when the BTRC implemented the court order. 

Asked why BTRC shut the registered news websites, the official said they just followed a list of authorised websites from the court. “We asked the information ministry for a list, but we didn’t get it.”

Telecoms Minister Mustafa Jabbar said, “No registered websites will be blocked. We are working on this with urgency.”

bdnews24.com’s website came back up sometime after the minister made the comment, as did the other registered websites. 

The information ministry could not be reached for comment on the allegation that it did not provide the list of registered websites to the BTRC.

Meanwhile, the High Court on Tuesday granted BTRC two more weeks to shut the unauthorised news websites. The panel of Justice Mozibur Rahman Miah and Kamrul Hossain Mollah extended the time to fulfil the order following the regulator’s request.

Reza-E-Rakib, the lawyer for BTRC, also said it could not shut the sites as it did not get the list from the information ministry.

In 2019, BTRC shut blogs and many other websites while blocking pornographic sites.