This article is about the recent news that on May 17th, Tsinghua University in Taiwan blocked the domain of Telegram, which sparked concerns about freedom and rights among the public. This was followed by the release of a letter from the Hsinchu City Government.
Previously, a creative private group called the “Taiwanese version of Nth room” used Telegram as a platform to sell illegal adult content, which received strong criticism from the society and drew attention from government agencies. The Ministry of Health and Welfare even threatened to “block Telegram.” Many netizens were confused about whether it was excessive to completely ban the use of Telegram as a communication application by stopping DNS resolution.
On May 17th, a student from Tsinghua University posted a warning on Dcard, stating that Telegram had been blocked on the campus network and attached a screenshot, causing concern among Taiwanese citizens.
After May 17th, a document from the Hsinchu City Government leaked online, requesting several DNS RPZ units in Taiwan to stop resolving the domains of overseas platforms such as oursogo, japaninporm, and Telegram, which have published sexually explicit content violating child and adolescent protection laws. The requested units include the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Health and Welfare, regional network centers such as the one at Tsinghua University, and major ISPs in Taiwan.
Yuri Heng, a cybersecurity engineer who is concerned about internet freedom in Taiwan, posted on his personal Facebook page to summarize the whole incident. He stated that the reason Tsinghua University blocked Telegram was because they received a letter from the Hsinchu City Government. The local government, upon receiving the report, directly sent letters to various DNS RPZ units without professional judgment from TWNIC, resulting in a two-layer “shortcut” blocking without going through the proper legal procedures.
Regarding the legal practice of stopping DNS resolution, the author has discussed with several legal professionals, and insiders have indicated that in the past, domain blocking cases were often carried out through court seizure procedures. However, in the past 3 to 4 years, the number of cases applying to TWNIC through administrative agencies has significantly increased, and there have been instances of local agencies directly sending letters to school network units and network centers without receiving formal approval from TWNIC after the application review process, and making decisions to stop DNS resolution based on “superior’s request.”
Currently, in Taiwan, domain blocking can be done not only through TWNIC but also by administrative agencies, including the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Health and Welfare, and the National Police Agency. Some individual opinions from the judiciary have expressed that if administrative agencies rush to stop DNS resolution, it will continuously expand the interpretation scope of current blocking conditions and make it more ambiguous. This, in turn, creates difficulties in building a complete legal framework for judicial personnel to apply for seizure through the court and conduct thorough investigations of crimes. Moreover, not all members of the judiciary are familiar with domain blocking issues.
In April of this year, the National Police Agency caused anger and ridicule from users when they stopped resolving WordPress-related websites in the process of cracking down on fraud groups. Professor Lu Ren from Ming Chuan University’s Department of Information Management also criticized the hijacking of WordPress websites in Taiwan.