Incompetence

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."