Bloggers Blocked

Well if you are a blogger or a blog reader than you would have surely read about Department of Telecommunication (DoT)‘s big brother act over internet users. And if you haven’t then surely you must have gone to visit your long-lost cousin on Planet Pluto. I mean seriously, it’s like the most sensational news of the year 2006; at least for our desi-blogging community.

I was not able to access certain BlogSpot sites on my blogroll on Friday evening. But didn’t think much into and just blamed my ISP for the glitch and the people behind BlogSpot.com. However the same situation was repeated on Saturday and later when I hopped onto DesiPundit did I realize that the same problem was being experienced by majority of bloggers in India (only).

As we Bloggers are known for spreading our causes and struggles across the internet – even this un-wanted act committed by DoT has been criticized and discussed by local and international bloggers. And our MSM has also touched on the topic, so what it took them nearly 4 days to figure it out (though some are still confused over the number of blocked sites). Shivan Vij has put up a detailed on account on this story.

From what I understand, our (not) efficient government has ordered a blackout of certain number of (some say 12, some believe its 18 and some think it’s around 20) sites for publishing content that was ‘anti-national’ and ‘against public interest’. Though government officials have defended their move by stating that the action against the concerned sites were in the pipe-line but most of us are smart enough to figure the actual reason behind this move; Mumbai Train Blasts.

Even if we give benefit of doubt to DoT and believe that this move has been taken with our best interest at heart – the problem here is that instead of bringing down the ‘black-listed’ sites such as bloodspot.com, hinduhumanrights.org, hinduuni-ty.org, the ISPs across the country have actually blocked up entire domains like Blogger.com, Typepad.com and Geocities. The fault here is that Indian ISPs are not equipped to filter specific pages and therefore many innocent bloggers are struggling looking for different methods and hacks to get thru to their own blogs as well as others.

Obviously the move has provoked strong reaction from the online community but I doubt if the DoT actually pays any attention to it – after all as per law, pornographic websites and websites containing inflammatory material promoting hate, violence or and terrorism, can be blocked.

Me not an expert on this but I was wondering, if our ISPs are not capable or equipped with blocking out just the required sites without effecting other blogs -then why doesn’t our DoT sends out a request to Blogger.com, Typepad.com, etc to delete those ‘black-listed’ blogs/sites from their respective systems?

It sounds to be a logical move.

By the way, I wanted to know what the heck ‘princesskimberley.com’ is all about.