Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 2:19 pm Post subject: Emergence of the Great Indian Firewall
A small story in Indian Express caught my eye so i decided to check the validity of it because the allegation seemed atrocious and a action like that is unimaginable in modern times.
The story said upon being instructed by Department of Telecommunications in India, ISP providers like Airtel and SpectraNet have blocked access to services of Blogspot.Com and Geocities.yahoo.com just because some extremist websites were operating there among millions of good websites and Blogs.
So i decided to check on this allegation which seemed ridiculous to me.
And upon checking i was shocked; Yes! they actually have blocked the sites! You can reach the main page but when you try to access a blog in blogger.com or access a website in yahoo.geocities.com you cannot - as your ISP decided for you that you cannot access Blogspot and geocities.
Looking at this incredibly funny incident a question comes to a reader's or website visitor's mind - if trying to stop access to a particular page of a particular site which is propagating violence and discrimination would it not have been an intelligent step to contact blogger.com and yahoo.com and put forward the complain to them instead of cutting off an entire nation of a billion people from accessing millions of good Blogs and good websites which can be accessed through these two services?
What really interests me that whether the Internet consumers are in a position to sue the ISP providers who have blocked access to these sites without even informing the consumers - for curtailing the right to information and also for financial losses that Indian Bloggers will acquire due to not being able to access and update their Blogs
This direct attack on freedom of speech of the non-extremist and loyal Indian citizen Bloggers by the ISPs to curtail access to few extremist websites - is it gradually showing emergence of the The Great Indian Firewall?
Now the ball has landed at the ISP's court as presumed by many. Telecommunication Department realising the faux pass that happened while trying to block specific extremist sites (As per the Telecom Department's definition of Online Extrimism!) and ISPs ending up blocking all sites of particular services like Geocities and Blogger due to lack of Blocking Technology (something nuclear) – Telecom Dept. has asked the ISPs for an explanation that why all sites were blocked. And it is also expected that Indian Bloggers soon will be able to access those services.
As one can guess the "Internet Censoring" i believe was supposed to be done silently away from the media glare, but the beans were spilled when the ISPs accidentally blocked all sites and it came to the notice of the general public.
The good news is that there are now talks of incorporating laws regarding blogging in the Indian Cyber Law !
I am really interested to know from those experts who will decide what the bloggers can talk about and what they can not – is this particular piece of writing illegal?
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