15 October 2015•Update: 15 October 2015
By CS Thana
BANGKOK
Thailand's ruling junta has scrapped a single gateway internet initiative that critics termed "The Great Firewall" after negative feedback from net users across the country.
Deputy Prime Minister Somkid Jatusripituk told reporters Thursday that the government has decided to abandon the initiative, claiming that the plan was only ever under consideration and never finalized.
Critics had warned that uniting all Internet services under a single gateway would allow Thailand's military government to monitor and spy on content as well as blocking websites it deems subversive.
The government, meanwhile, had argued that the plan was necessary to protect Thailand against unwanted content and to restrict Thai youth from accessing unwanted material.
Earlier this month, thousands of Internet users were reported to have flooded government websites in an effort to force the pages to crash by exceeding their bandwidth capacity.
Websites belonging to the Ministry for Information and Communication Technology, the Ministry of Defense and of Government House were overloaded and left unavailable by the sheer numbers of users trying to access them.
Meanwhile, a Change.org petition against the initiative had garnered 131,000 signatures as of Thursday.
