Blogs not loading on big ISPs; bloggers cry foul.
Blogs not loading on big ISPs; bloggers cry foul.
Indian bloggers are up in arms about what appears to be the blocking of all weblogs hosted on popular website blogger.com.
What started as a minor irritation on Friday evening, with blogs not loading on Reliance and Spectranet connections, soon spread to other Indian ISPs. By Monday evening, no blogspot-hosted blogs could be accessed on Sify, Tata Indicom, MTNL, Airtel, Exatt, Swiftmail, and Incable in addition to Reliance and Spectranet. Some of the ISPs also blocked sites hosted on Typepad and Yahoo’s Geocities.
Piyush Agarwal, general manager, broadband for MTNL Mumbai, said MTNL had not blocked any blogs. An MTNL official in New Delhi, however, said he had received a 22-page list of websites to be blocked from the National Informatics Centre, which comes under the wing of the central Ministry of Information Technology. Officials in the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) confirmed that ISPs across the country had been asked to block 18 websites. They did not give details of the websites blocked.
The instruction was issued on July 13, following the blasts in Mumbai on July 11, according to a reliable source. Most of the websites, which the government wants blocked, are understood to be of communal nature. Deepak Maheshwari, secretary of the Internet Service Providers Association of India said, “The government does instruct ISPs from time to time to block websites. And ISPs must abide by that directive.” He did not comment on the inaccessibility of blogs. Despite repeated calls, Reliance and Airtel did not comment.
The blocking of the blogs seems to be the result of well-intentioned policing gone awry. Sources say the list of blocked websites included the names of specific blogs, but ISPs seemed to have blocked the service all together.
The blogging community is not taking the matter lying down. Discussions that started on individual blogs (like withinandwithout.com) were organised into a Blogger’s Collective (groups.google.com/group/BloggersCollective). Members have been contacting their ISPs and government officials in a bid to understand why their freedom of expression has been clamped.
Blogger Amit Varma of India Uncut said, “If the government is indeed blocking blogs from Blogspot and Typepad, it’s incredibly silly and misguided. My guess is that they intended to block a particular hate blog, and the entire domain got taken down because of inept implementation. I hope they correct it soon. It would be a great pity if India went the way of China or Pakistan as far as free speech is concerned.”
The man at the centre of the controversy, Dr Gulshan Rai of the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN) which is incharge of internet security and censorship in India, refused to comment. “I cannot tell you about one website offhand,” he said.
Nandkumar Saravade, director of cyber security, NASSCOM, said, “If there is a block, people must be informed. If not, then the authorities must enquire into the cause of the problem.”
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