Censorship

Open has a detailed piece on the travails of Mouthshut.com, the online review site, as it deals with companies which want negative reviews taken down.

According to the MEA, there are 90 TV channels of foreign origin which are being down-linked into India legally. There are apparently many which have not sought the necessary permissions to do so including 24 which have been deemed by the Intelligence Bureau to be "anti-national". Most of these are down-linked and broadcast via cable TV in India's border states.

After the low key response to the June 9 protests, Anonymous India has labelled it only "Phase 1" of their plans and have announced "Phase 2". The second phase has been dubbed "Operation RTI" and appears to be an elaborate recce to unearth information related to Internet censorship in the country. The plan is to get "citizens of India" to file RTI applications pertaining to any communications between government officials and companies such as Google and Facebook.

In light of the recent blocking of websites in India and the cries of "CENSORSHIP!" all across Twitter, spare a thought for our Chinese neighbours who have long been suffering beneath the cudgels of the Great Firewall of China.

Since the beginning of this month, certain ISPs have been blocking access to streaming video and torrent sites on their networks. As of today, just about every ISP in the country is reported to be blocking the following sites:

The Economic Times confirms that the DoT has ordered ISPs to only block the blogs in question rather than entire domains or IP addresses.

DoT has also issued a show cause notice to ISPs following pressure from the government. “The DoT has further sought explanation from the erring ISPs as to why action be not taken against them for blocking unintended websites and webpages,” a government notice on the issue said.

It appears that ISPs all across India have been ordered by the Indian government to block a number of key websites on the Internet.

ISPs are believed to have been asked to block sites like bloodspot.com, hinduhumanrights.org, hinduuni-ty.org and clickatell.com, besides frontline blogs like the Google-owned blogsp-ot.com. Deepak Maheshwari, secretary of ISP Association of India said: “We have received a letter from DoT, asking us to block around 18 URLs.”

Though the communication, dated July 13, by the telcom department to ISPs lists specific pages/ websites, several ISPs have blocked all blogs because they were not equipped to filter specific pages. This could be because all websites hosted on blogspot.com, for instance, have the same IP address.

Officials defended the decision saying, "We would like those people to come forward who access these (the 12) radical websites and please explain to us what are they missing from their lives in the absence of these sites."