Thai junta mulls 'Great Firewall'

Thailand's junta is facing growing opposition over plans to introduce a single Internet gateway for the country to make it easier to monitor the web and block content.

Tens of thousands of people have signed a petition against the proposal, which has been dubbed the "Great Firewall of Thailand" -- a play on China's draconian Internet censorship programme -- by commentators, analysts and netizens.

News of the proposal first emerged last week when a cabinet order was unearthed by a Thai programmer and spread on social media.

By yesterday afternoon more than 72,000 people had signed a petition on Change.org calling on the government to abandon the proposal.

The cabinet statement, published quietly on a government news website, ordered the Ministry of Information, Communications and Technology to "set up a single gateway in order to use it as a tool to control inappropriate websites and information flows from other countries via the Internet".

A ministry spokesman yesterday confirmed to AFP that they were working on the plans and aimed to update the public on the proposals within a week.

Internet gateways are the points on a network where a country connects to the worldwide web.

Initially Thailand's Internet flowed through a single gateway owned by the government.

But the sector was deregulated in 2006, allowing dozens of companies to open their own access points -- resulting in dramatically increased Internet speeds and Thailand emerging as a regional IT hub.