More on India’s bone-headed attempt to censor bloggers from the BBC today:

India’s burgeoning blogging community is up in arms against a government directive that they say has led to the blocking of their web logs.

The country’s 153 internet service providers (ISP) have blocked 17 websites since last week on federal government orders.

Some of these sites belong to Google’s Blogspot, a leading international web log hosting service.

Indian bloggers say that the decision is an attack on freedom of speech.

A number of them have started filing petitions under the country’s new landmark freedom of information law which gives citizens the right to access information held by the government.

Bloggers say the ban has meant that people do not even have access to blogs like the one set up to help the relatives of the victims of the recent train bombings in Mumbai (Bombay), www.mumbaihelp.blogspot.com.

This is sheer idiocy. And it isn’t the first time India’s banned bloggers:

A federal government notification of July 2003 says it can ban websites in the interest of:

* sovereignty or integrity of India
* security of the state
* friendly relations with foreign states and public order
* preventing incitement to commissioning of any cognisable offences.

The sites that have been banned include ones with right-wing Hindu links and an anti-Communist one. At least four of them are on the Blogspot hosting service.

This is not the first time that the government has ordered the blocking of websites since its notification three years ago.

Two years ago, the government blocked a site under a popular message group saying it was indulging in “anti-national activity”.

Nilanjana Roy writes in the India Business Standard newspaper:

This is not just a blogger issue. Countries that practice Internet censorship include Korea, Zimbabwe, Burma and Iran–not a club any government would be proud to belong to.

Bloggers are affected. But so are ordinary Netizens who like the conversations that many blogs and homepages enable; their freedom of speech has been abruptly curtailed.

By Monday, the Indian government’s block on domains was news on the big sites–Google, Technorati, Digg, Boing Boing, Michelle Malkin. By trying to shut down the innocuous along with the potentially threatening, the Indian government looks like a bully.

By refusing to explain its actions, the Indian government looks like a particularly inept bully. I’d prefer a higher opinion of my country than this. I hope the Indian state will prove us wrong by explaining itself and lifting this block.

WSJ reported this afternoon that India has backed down:

The Indian government told the country’s Internet-service providers to cease blocking popular sites full of Web logs, or “blogs,” after attempts to restrict access to the sites spurred protests from the online community.

In a meeting Wednesday, India’s Department of Telecommunications clarified that the Internet-service providers have to block access only to specific blogs within the sites—not entire sites that contain blogs, according to the Internet Service Providers Association of India. The confusion had resulted in many blogs being blocked inadvertently.

Last week, the telecom department gave service providers a list of more than 15 Web sites they wanted blocked to users in India. The orders were issued without an explanation of why the sites needed to be blocked or how long they should be blocked. As a result, many service providers extended blanket blockades over sites popular for posting personal Web pages, including Google Inc.’s Blogger.

“The association has sent out an advisory to all members to configure their servers and block only the subdomains and not entire sites,” said Amitabh Singhal, a spokesman for the service-provider group. “In their haste to comply with the government orders, [ISPs] blocked the [Internet] addresses, and that was a mistake. I am hoping that within 48 hours this will be rectified.”

The moves followed last week’s commuter-train bombings in Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, which killed more than 200 people. Critics have lashed out at the government and its intelligence services for missing clues to potential security threats. Officials have declined to say whether the blacklisting of the sites was related to the blasts, which the Indian government has blamed on Islamic militants operating from Pakistan.

Separately, the Indian Consulate in New York said it had been seeking clarification of the order. It said it was told that India’s telecom department had found on a popular blog site “a two-page write up containing extremely derogatory references to Islam and the holy prophet, which had the potential to inflame religious sensitivities in India and create serious law and order problems,” according to an email that was confirmed by the consulate.

Indian blogger Dina Mehta sends a letter to the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology. Background from Amit Varma and Amit Agarwal.

More on the blog ban being lifted (supposedly within 48 hours) at Rediff.com.

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Related: Web users urged on China policy

UK users of Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google are being urged by Amnesty International to email the companies to change the way they operate in China.

The firms have aided or colluded with internet censorship in the country, the human rights watchdog says.

It is asking the internet giants to reveal which words they have banned from blogs in China or filtered out of web searches.

The technology firms say they are helping develop more freedom in China.

But Amnesty says they are helping to reinforce censorship by the Chinese government.

“Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google claim they are obeying local laws when in fact they are succumbing to political pressure,” Kate Allen, Amnesty International UK Director, said.

“We want them to hear from customers here in the UK.

“If enough people tell them they’re not happy with their actions in China, we hope it will make them think again.”

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Censoring blogs in India
Who’s banning your website?
Another blog banned in the UAE
Banned in the UAE
The China-Google Protest Logo Album
More China Google protest logos

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