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India Joins China in Censoring Websites

Posted by timothy on Mon Jul 17, 2006 01:22 PM
from the keeping-up-with-the-wangs dept.
Censorship The Internet
cpatil writes "On the directions of the government of India, Indian ISPs have started censoring and blocking web properties. This was first noticed by Indian bloggers and upon inquiring with their respective ISPs, the actions are confirmed. Unfortunately, Blogspot and TypePad are the targets till now." There's an ongoing discussion of the censorship on GoogleGroups. The rediff.com coverage linked above indicates that the blocking is based on a list issued by India's Department of Telecommunications.

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[+] Indian Government Lifts Ban on Blogs 135 comments
iDope writes "The Department of Telecommunications of the Government of India has lifted the ban on blogs (reported previously on Slashdot) following pressure from the Indian blogger community and the media. Even with the lifting of the ban several bloggers from BloggersCollective are getting ready to file a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) (similar to a Class Action Lawsuit in US) in the Supreme Court of India against the Government censorship of the Internet."
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  • For some, it seems odd that a radical anarcho-capitalist would support ANY State action, especially censorship. There is usually only one anti-State camp: the people who want to dismiss the State through some means (voting, bloody revolution, non-violent revolution, black market lifestyle, etc). I don't see ANY way to get rid of the State and any of its forms of coercion (including censorship) through any of the previous means. Every time a right is taken away by a State, every time the State steals from you in the form of taxation and every time the State decides it can help large groups, it does so at very little cost to the individual. You and I won't do anything to prevent US$1 a year from being taken from us, or some fringe right that we don't really see heling our existence. Yet when you combine all those little US$1 fees taken from each individual in the US, someone is earning billions. That person will work extra hard to protect that income, but the millions won't work extra hard to fight a US$1 fee annually. The same is true with rights -- most people won't worry about their basic rights because they feel mostly free. When 10 million people are harmed by an infringement, 290 million residents aren't. Why should they care about 0.3% of the population?

    The reason I support State censorship of all media is the same reason why I support the State in all of its madness: the more they do to harm us, the more the free market will provide means for entrepreneurs to find new ways around the madness.

    Many of the towns near me have increased their sales tax: up to 9% in some towns! The free market provided loopholes around sales tax for years, and the Internet is the ultimate form of working around the local madness. I don't buy very much locally anymore, and I get to save a huge amount that the State would usually get. It makes me laugh when the local politicians argue about what they're losing to the web. They stole from me, now I get to take it back.

    Many of the towns near me are starting to create smoke free "public places" which exist within private property. You can't smoke in restaurants, bars, nightclubs, anywhere. The free market is opening up amazing private property venues for me -- I've already visited 4 private dinner clubs -- the houses of famous and strong chefs in the region who gave up their jobs in order to provide exceptional meals to private consumers. They don't charge a fee, they ask for a donation. For US$50, I can get an amazing meal that gets around most of the regulations of the restaurant-restrictions placed. I can smoke, the chef can cook foods in ways that restaurants often can't, and I pay less than 1/3rd of the usual fee. Some dinner clubs include great wine, and the service is top notch. The chef doesn't worry about income taxes or permits or paying off the local zoning authority and health agency -- and I have yet to hear of anyone getting sick or the like. Good for me, good for the chef, bad for the State.

    Let the State censor all of us -- it will only give entrepreneurs more reason to find anonymous replacements of the publicly regulated web. Give it time and who knows what will happen. If every device will be State-required to have some sort of "control" mechanism or DRM or who-knows-what, someone will develop a private hive network on our cell phones or PDAs or old hardware. As long as the State restricts, the market will find ways to provide.

    The State: let it grow, let it restrain, let it fail to provide and let the imbeciles that support it think they're doing good for others. I've already found my ways to ignore it in 70% of my life. Eventually I'll extend that more, and not be concerned with what the mad majority wants to do this year that will harm people for generations.

  • I guess slashdot would be on the blacklist (Score:2, Informative)

    by crummyname (977083) on Monday July 17 2006, @01:28PM (#15732479)
    Web sites can be blocked if they contain pornography, speeches of hate, contempt, slander or defamation, or if they promote gambling, racism, violence or terrorism.

    My, that's awfully broad.

  • Good for innovation (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Henry V .009 (518000) on Monday July 17 2006, @01:29PM (#15732485)
    (Last Journal: Wednesday September 28 2005, @12:05PM)
    Maybe this is good:

    Censorship in a technically savvy, non-repressed country, will spur censorship-circumvention technology by leaps and bounds.

  • All your TOR are belong to us? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by davidwr (791652) on Monday July 17 2006, @01:30PM (#15732491)
    (http://slashdot.org/~davidwr/journal/ | Last Journal: Friday November 09, @09:19PM)
    First they came for the political dissidents. I was not a political dissident.

    Then they came for the religous prosthelizers. I was not a religous prosthelizer.

    Then they came for the pornographers. I was not a pornographer.

    Then they came for the bloggers. That day I got religion and began standing up for my right to sell p0rn.

  • not completely new (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Coneasfast (690509) on Monday July 17 2006, @01:30PM (#15732493)
    India has always been a censoring country (although not as much as China). Usually, anything sexually obscene, or anything else considered highly controversial with the general population will be censored/banned (ie, movies such as 'Water').

    However, censoring blog sites is a step down, why would they do this?
    "The list [of censored sites] is confidential and I can't make it public"
    It seems like they are trying to push some sort of hidden agenda.

  • Cencorship sucks (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2006, @01:31PM (#15732499)
    This is very sad. The reason lies not only with dumb politicians but also dumb implementation of policy. Basically, the Indian govt. had sent a list of 22 blogs/sites that it wanted blocked and the ISP's just blocked the entire domain. I hope this will be corrected soon.
    Not that I condone the blocking of the 22 sites. Opinion, no matter how counter culturalistic, or hard to swallow must be allowed to be expressed.
    The good out of this is that Indian bloggers have filed an application for release the list of the 22 sites blocked. I am very interested to know which sites were officially blocked and why? I have a suspicision that this could have something to do with recent bombings in India. For now, I guess its wait and see.

  • Hmmm (Score:5, Funny)

    by Cisko Kid (987514) on Monday July 17 2006, @01:33PM (#15732520)
    I saw Indiana Jones in that headline. I need more coffee....

  • How effective is it? (Score:1)

    by in2mind (988476) on Monday July 17 2006, @01:34PM (#15732536)
    (http://in2mind.blogspot.com/)
    While the block seems to have comewith the reasoning as 'Security',its still possible to access these blogs anyway.

    http://www.pkblogs.com/ [pkblogs.com] is a very easy way to access blogspot page.
    Opens any X.blogspot.com page.
    Tried my own blog...opens fine....:)

    The usual anonymizer.com also works...

  • From TFA:

    "Web sites can be blocked if they contain pornography, speeches of hate, contempt, slander or defamation, or if they promote gambling, racism, violence or terrorism."

    They can't block 95% of the Internet! :-)

  • Payoff (Score:1)

    by eronysis (928181) on Monday July 17 2006, @01:36PM (#15732559)
    I would expect to see some large network launch a large Weblog community intended for soley in country use and advertising. My dollar is this was a payout by the owners of the above mnetioned service. This just smells of dirty money.

  • Optimism (Score:2)

    by Savage-Rabbit (308260) on Monday July 17 2006, @01:39PM (#15732578)
    Web sites can be blocked if they contain pornography, speeches of hate, contempt, slander or defamation, or if they promote gambling, racism, violence or terrorism.

    Wow, what an ambitious task. Perhaps those Indian censors try to make the river Ganges flow up hill while they are at it.
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
  • If you were making censorship laws, what would YOU allow a judge to order someone to not disclose? Yes, we are talking about prior restraint.

    In the USA, judges have the power to issue prior restraint when the person who has the knowledge obtained in on the condition of non-disclosure. For example, a former employer can gag me from spilling corporate secrets. Ditto spilling state secrets if I have a security clearance, or spilling info form a Grand Jury investigation if I was in the hearing room.

    In the USA, judges can also restrain you from posting obscene materials or child pornography, as those are illegal to publish under just about any circumstances.

    In some countries, of course, the government has more prior restraint power.

    So, Slashdotters, how much if any prior restraint would you allow if you were making the rules?

  • Indian Jones? (Score:1, Redundant)

    by Racher (34432) on Monday July 17 2006, @01:42PM (#15732605)
    Did anyone else read that as "Indian Jones Censoring Websites"

    Throw me the laptop, I'll throw you the link!

  • Indiana Jones (Score:1, Redundant)

    by mobby_6kl (668092) on Monday July 17 2006, @01:45PM (#15732624)
    Uh, looks like my English parser failed me again, from the first glance I assumed the headline said "Indiana Jones", until I realized the absurdity after reading the summary.

    Why aren't they censoring Myspace though? It's a much more serious threat to any civilized society than Blogspot, porn, or terrorists.

  • It won't last... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymovs Coward (724746) on Monday July 17 2006, @01:48PM (#15732641)
    India isn't China. Never attribute to malice what is explained by incompetence, especially in India. Some bungling bureaucrat had this bright idea, but the sites will be accessible again in a short while. It's happened before. (In fact, right now I can access them from my home account though not from my work account.)

  • This is a bad thing? (Score:1)

    by gravyface (592485) on Monday July 17 2006, @01:56PM (#15732709)
    "...Unfortunately, Blogspot and TypePad are the targets till now."
    Oh no! No more blogs? Hrmm.. wait a second...

  • Democracy sure does equal freedom (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MikeRT (947531) on Monday July 17 2006, @02:05PM (#15732759)
    (http://www.codemonkeyramblings.com/)
    Take that, you idiots who wring your hands about "losing your democracy." Democracy and freedom are not the same thing, and the one does NOT by default lead to the other. In fact, the only major accomplishment of democracy has been to grant legitimacy to the Fascist state. It allows the masses to throw their weight in behind every violation of the rights of the minority.

    What India has proved is that democratic states have no inherent moral authority. It has landed itself in the same mass of political crap that China and Saudi Arabia are in. There is no moral difference between states that censor, even if it is "benign." Either way, a state that practices official censorship of anything except for media that requires violence or fraud to be created, is a regime that directly or indirectly uses the threat of loss of life, liberty or property to silence others. There is no moral difference between a threat of prosecution and simply shooting someone in the head, when the offense is speaking out with an unpopular idea.

    And by the way, has that rubbish about the Internet detecting censorship as damage and routing around been relegated to the trash heap of history where it belongs? It seems that for citizens of China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, India and Britain (with its hashed list of "bad sites" as if we even know whether they're all illegal under British law.) that the only routing that is being down is getting in trouble or sent to prison for non-compliance.

    • Re:Democracy sure does equal freedom (Score:4, Interesting)

      by radish (98371) on Monday July 17 2006, @02:55PM (#15733182)
      (http://slashdot.org/)
      Either way, a state that practices official censorship of anything except for media that requires violence or fraud to be created, is a regime that directly or indirectly uses the threat of loss of life, liberty or property to silence others.
      I agree, but you left the US off your list of countries. I'm not sure if that was intentional or not, but you did all the same. There are plenty of examples of banned media in the US which needed neither violence nor fraud to be created. You can read more here [upenn.edu] and here [banned-books.com].
      [ Parent ]

    • Re:Democracy sure does equal freedom (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Vellmont (569020) on Monday July 17 2006, @03:22PM (#15733390)

      Democracy and freedom are not the same thing, and the one does NOT by default lead to the other.


      I think you're exactly right, and that's why the founding fathers of the US gave us the bill of rights. They knew that democracy didn't grant freedom and had to be something explicitly addressed as one of our highest laws. They were all specifically designed to protect the rights of the minority over the tyranny of the majority. They also made it hard to take away these rights by creating a difficult (but not impossible) process to amend the constitution.

      Obviously democracy isn't perfect. It took almost 100 years for the US to abolish slavery, and really we still haven't recovered from its effects yet. India is a very different place that the United States. It's still extremely conservative when it comes to sex, and the cast system is directly opposite the egalitarian values of the US. I don't think it should be surprising that they're still trying to control access to new ideas from the western world. In the end it won't matter, especially in a less restrictive country like India. You can't stomp out the rest of the world even NOW, and we're becoming more connected every day. Just think about how different the world is going to be in only 50 years.
      [ Parent ]
    • Re:Democracy sure does equal freedom by identity0 (Score:2) Monday July 17 2006, @05:33PM
    • There is no difference by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) (Score:3) Monday July 17 2006, @07:48PM
    • Re:Uh... wow. by JesseMcDonald (Score:2) Monday July 17 2006, @03:11PM
      • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.

  • Censorship in India (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bayankaran (446245) on Monday July 17 2006, @02:10PM (#15732783)
    (http://manasarovar.info/landing.htm)
    Censorship in India is inconsistent and haphazard to say the least.

    Local and Central governments will ban/reject a book/film on the pretext that it will be dangerous to religious sentiments or social harmony. An example is the James Laine's book - An Epic on Shivaji [hinduonnet.com], books by Salman Rushdie, the Peter Seller's comedy 'The Party', and even the innocuous (though a bit silly) documentaries made by Louis Malle in the late 60's.

    Most of the Anand Patwardhan documentaries [patwardhan.com] were banned/not cleared and his battles with the Indian censor boards show the tolerance level for the overlords are very low. One of the documentaries (if my memory is correct 'Father, Son and Holy War' [imdb.com]) had footage of the chief minister of the state of Maharashtra and later the speaker of Lok Sabha (lower house of parliament) - Manohar Joshi [wikipedia.org] - seen extolling Hindu women during a rally in a remote Maharashtrian town to give birth to more children to offset the rise in Muslim population (typical FUD by hardliners). If such utterances can be made at a political rally, I have no idea what banning the documentary will prove.

    The same time, the most vulgar, sexist and reactionary Hindi (Bollywood for you), Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Malayalam or other popular cinema pass the censors with absolutely no problem.

    Also the Indian Government is yet to relax its hold on radio and licenses to operate a station [wikipedia.org] - which actually reach the 100% of the Indian population (compared to 10-20% reach of the mostly urban satellite/cable.)

  • India and China are very different cases (Score:4, Insightful)

    by CurtMonash (986884) on Monday July 17 2006, @02:11PM (#15732798)
    (http://www.monash.com/blogs.html)
    China's obvious censorship goal -- quasi-permanent