India increases its censorship of the Internet

In the face of a public outcry, the United Progressive Alliance government is now trying to shift blame for the lengthy disruption of Internet service onto the country’s service providers, saying it was they who chose to deny access to domains and blog-hosts, rather than explicitly targeting the 17 sites that the government had named in its order, because this was technically far easier and far cheaper to do.

The truth, however, is otherwise: the Indian government has given itself broad powers to censor the Internet and two days after the July 11 Mumbai bombings used these powers in a completely arbitrary and undemocratic manner, issuing secret orders to Internet providers to block certain sites and pages, then refusing to publicly reveal which sites it had banned or explain why it had ordered them blocked.

Only after the passing of a more than a week and much public pressure did the government issue a second order to the ISPs, stipulating that they should block only the sites named in its first order.

Government claims that the denial of access to much of the Internet was an unexpected consequence of the ISPs trying to do its bidding at the least cost to themselves are contradicted by a senior official in the Information Technology Ministry, who said, “Indian ISPs don’t have the technology to block individual name servers—say, a particular blog hosted on Blogspot. So they had no choice but to block the root servers of major blogging networks—Blogspot, Geocities and Typepad.”

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http://wsws.org/articles/2006/jul2006/indi-j29.shtml