India: Latest rider on the Internet-censorship bandwagon?

July 18, 2006 | Category: Uncategorized

A potential new fly in the ointment for those who hold aloft India as the democratic alternative to China in the Asian power game. From BoingBoing:

India’s Department of Telecommunications (DoT) passed an order to ISPs Friday to block several websites. The list is confidential. Indian ISPs have been slowly coming into compliance. SpectraNet, MTNL, Reliance, and as of Monday afternoon, Airtel. State-backed BSNL and VSNL have not started yet but likely will soon. The known list of blocked domains is *.blogspot.com, *.typepad.com and geocities.com/*.

Yes folks, the Indian government has decided to censor blogs and refused to explain why. This morning Shivam Vij managed to talk to Dr Gulshan Rai, director of CERT-IN, the only body authorised to issue directives to ISPs. His response: “Somebody must have asked for some sites to be blocked. What is your problem?”

No word as to why just yet and haven’t confirmed this myself. One comment on the post points to terrorism as justification. Another cautions the whole thing may have been a misunderstanding on the part of Indian ISPs, who could have taken a request to block a few specific blogs and expanded it on their own.

Or perhaps certain ideas about information control have already started leaking south through the recently reopened Silk Road border crossing at Nathu La.

Damned globalization.

A bit early to be issuing condemnations, of course. But if this is true, it don’t look good.

No Comments

Leave a Reply




Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.