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The Indian blogosphere is abuzz again with purported news that several ISPs in India may have blocked the Blogspot domain. But since, the primary government ISPs such as BSNL and VSNL doesn’t seem to have blocked the domain, it doesn’t seem to be an order from the top. However, when the Bangalore ISP Spectranet at Delhi admits to have received a letter from the Ministry of Communications to block the domain, things seem a bit fishy. I am not sure that is the case however because in case of a government directive VSNL and BSNL would be first to fall in line. Others have indicated that it may simply be a bureaucratic messup as someone inadvertently blocked the entire domain when they effectively wanted to block a certain blog on Blogger.
However, if you aren’t getting your blog fix and happen to subscribe to those ISPs in question, then you will benefit greatly from Amit’s suggested solutions (access through PKblogs). Let us hope the government didn’t get too paranoid after the Bombay blasts and decided to crack down on blogs for alleged rumor mongering. Trust me, if the blogs had that wide an audience to make any rumor worthwhile then we surely would know about it. I also suppose this ties in with the phone networks being brought down during a calamity (technical overload included) to avoid widespread panic. But at the same time, information dissemination via blogs especially through sites like Mumbai Help proved invaluable when phone lines were down.
Let us hope that this is merely a technical glitch rather than a government directive. If it is the latter, then it might be time for another blog campaign.
by Patrix | on Sunday, July 16th, 2006 at 4:07 pm | 
Governance, India, Technology, Weblogs . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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July 16th, 2006 at 4:42 pm reply
Pat,
A correction. VSNL is no loner owned by the government. It was bought by TATA remember?
I am a little sceptical of the government blocking the sites theory, but then, can’t ever be sure.
July 16th, 2006 at 5:00 pm reply
Confused, my bad! correction made. I am skeptical of the government too…wouldn’t be so stupid. But then, given the wackos doing similarly ridiculous moral policing, who knows!
July 16th, 2006 at 10:16 pm reply
Another correction: I called up the Delhi office of Spectranet, not the Bangalore office. Things appear to be normal here in Bangalore …
July 19th, 2006 at 2:16 am reply
I have BSNL dataone at home and Airtel at my office in Bangalore and am not able to access either Geocities or Blogspot sites. There seems to be a problem with our Govt behaving like their Chinese counterparts in censorship.
I have a suggestion for them. Concentrate of real procedure of investigation and intelligence gathering. Such methods have not and will not work. What are the going to do next? Read all our emails and snail mails?
Kshitij Sharma