It’s not censorship
July 19, 2006If you studied under CBSE regime and paid attention during your eighth grade standard, you would have learnt that ‘freedom of speech’is one of your fundamental rights. and if you live in Kerala you also get the right to join the SFI and burn state buses. that’s another discussion, we will leave that for later.
There has been a lot of noise in the blogWorld (sorry, working for IDG makes you add World to everything) that India has become the next China, Iran, Ethiopia, North Korea etc. So much has been said about this ‘BAN’ and how dumb/idiotic/moronic the Indian establishment is for doing such a thing. Some even went to the extent of claiming that ‘The terrorists have won’.
Fellow countrymen, lets just go over a few points,
- We don’t even block obvious porn sites.
- Anti-government sites, almost every militant unit (LTTE, ULFA, JKLF etc) all have websites that are not blocked.
- Do you serious think that people in the Indian Government, DoT, CERT-IN, the ISPs are silly enough to block/ban something like Google’s blogger?
A reason for this “access control” was posted on this blog. There is no issue of censorship here. If that were the case, trust me, the Government has bigger fish to fry than blogger. I can understand that the Indian government perhaps doesn’t have the best PR policies but let this not be a reason to slag them off throughout the blogWorld. Let’s go easy on the RTIs and show some patience.
Hi,
I reached this blog of yours by chance and really find this article very amusing. In fact I feel it is one of the very few that thinks this is not an issue of censorship. I didnt know how to contact you and is thereby leaving a comment here for you.
You must be knowing about merinews-India’s first participatory journalism website. Now, they are coming up with a special coverage on this blocking of blogs. I request you to share this article with million of other readers at merinews. Some of previous merinews special issues like Rock Music in India were immensely successful. If you agree to post thios article in merinews mail it as a word document to me at consultingsudipta@gmail.com.
I agree with your stated points. Seems like CERT-IN just had to come up with something …
Hi,
I’m glad to see such a take on this subject. It is not about censorship, it is about governmental stupidity. Stupid, and out of touch too. Remember commercial and national security secrets were stolen from under the government’s noses using USB pen drives…technology has left the Indian government behind and it’s beginning to show.
And I’m sure that the Indian government is yet to realise that it needs to figure out how to work in an information-abundant age.
arre but why this sudden action? without notifying or making any announcements? The government is takin us blggers for granted….the whole net community actually
[...] Its Not Censorship There has been a lot of noise in the blogWorld (sorry, working for IDG makes you add World to everything) that India has become the next China, Iran, Ethiopia, North Korea etc. So much has been said about this ‘BAN’ and how dumb/idiotic/moronic the Indian establishment is for doing such a thing. Some even went to the extent of claiming that ‘The terrorists have won’. [...]