Time to update everyone on the status of banned blogs in India. Allegedly the bans are coming off, and the worldwide outrage is part of the reason, IMO. As interesting, is the backstory as it is now coming out in the Indian press.
The whole episode started when a hard right American website, ExposingTheLeft.Blogspot.Com, made a couple of snide comments about Iran and slammed Hizbollah. This was along with their usual tripe about same sex marriage and the other bogey men of the whacko US right wing, but nothing out of the ordinary for day to day Fox News watchers. There were a bunch of other wrongosphere websites judged offensive by some bureaucrat in the Indian telecommunications establishment and since several were on the blogspot service and one on typepad they did the "easy" thing and banned all blogspot and typepad blogs.
Government officials today defended their action against the three blogspot.com sites and eight other websites they have ordered Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block from Indian viewers. Several Department of Telecom officials, contacted through the day, declined to comment. An official in charge of cybersecurity said: "Google should take the initiative to block sites that are offensive to us. If it doesn't, we have to take such action."
All banned blogs are being hosted on a website that Google owns. The websites are hosted both in India and abroad, which complicates matters, since bloggers are being forced out of their blogs because of the ban.
''There are ways to bypass the ban which makes it ineffectual, but there's another complication, it's not easy for India to block blogs selectively if they are not hosted here,'' says Supreme Court lawyer Pavan Duggal. (Indian Express)
One of the other eleven banned blogs (NB: not all owned by Google) contained a mild play on the word mujahadeen while others criticized Indian politicians or are Hindu human rights sites. Indian Express noted one of the banned sites was from a woman blogging about how boring her life is.
The stupidity of banning all blogs over these alleged offenses and the added stupidity of banning these blogs for these offenses shows how little understanding there is of the new means of communication enabled by the internet, the consequences of trying to block them and the likelihood of success. Heavy-handed censorship will be the norm and it won't work.
I'm sure it won't stop governments from trying.
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exposetheleft.blogspot.com does not exist, the whack jobs have moved to exposetheleft.com, I checked it out, in a word, drivel.
Darin: Just shows how stupid trying to block them by blocking blogspot was.
This sort of anti-free speech idiocy just burns me up. I used to rant about Austria putting David Irving in jail for his vile Holocaust denial, but this is even worse. At least in Austria, one can make a case that Holocaust denial is dangerous, as it is associated with paramilitary far right groups. I fail to see how in India the content of these blogs is the least bit dangerous.