India censoring web sites?

Hmmm... India has now joined the "the internet is bad for you, mmmmkay" fray and started to censor evil web sites, such as blogs.

Anil Saxena of Spectranet confirmed that the list sent by the DoT contained names of particular blogs, but added that Blogspot as a whole had not been blocked. This is contrary to the experience of customers like Dwivedi, who are still unable to view sites hosted on Blogspot, in addition to those on Typepad and Yahoo!'s Geocities. "The list is confidential and I can't make it public," said Saxena.

The question beckons: Why? Why are some blogs blocked and why are others not? What would a democratic government be afraid of?

(Via Slashdot.)

Update: Rediff lists the sites that are blocked. It would appear that the banning criteria is that some those sites are critical (or downright offensive) of Islam. Or, like in one case, a defunct girl's journal.




Comments

What do you think, is your blog banned? :)

--Jasmo, 19-Jul-2006


The "started to censor..." -link leads to irrelevant story at Macworld.

Check out the article on subject at BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/5194172.stm.

--erkka, 19-Jul-2006


OOps, thanks! Must've been a cut-n-paste-o...

Jasmo: heh. If they're using anything based on keywords...

--JanneJalkanen, 19-Jul-2006


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