Blogs blocked

INTERNET: Blog censorship, as the government is trying, is a lousy idea.

It started on Friday, when some Indian bloggers discovered that we couldn’t access blogs on the popular Blogspot domain.

Along with Rediff blogs, Blogspot is a key hosting site for Indian and international bloggers. At last count, more than 40,000 bloggers who identified themselves as Indian were hosted on Blogspot.

Initially, the block was limited to a few Indian ISPs, but it spread. Readers couldn’t access any blogs on Blogspot — Indian, American or, come to that, Ukrainian.

Mridula blew the whistle on her blog; then bloggers from Dina Mehta to Shivam Vij and Desipundit began to post. At Within/ Without, Neha Viswanathan hosted a running update.

The ban was clumsy. We could still post from Blogger — but if you were located in India on specific ISPs, you couldn’t see your blog or other blogs. Experienced Net users offered easy ways to bypass the block. (Use sites like www.pkblogs.com, anonymizer services, or RSS feeds to read blocked pages; www.boingboing.net has tips on how to handle Net censorship.)

Indian government departments refused to confirm, deny or offer any information on the block. Over the weekend, the block spread to Typepad and Geocities.

It made no sense. Blogs on the equally popular Rediff and Wordpress are accessible; the block could be bypassed; and we still didn’t know the reason behind the ban.

The blogger community in India has joined forces before — after the tsunami, after Mumbai’s rains, after the Mumbai blasts. Now it had to defend its own territory.

Within 24 hours, Peter Griffin, Amit Varma, Saket Vaidya and others had set up the Bloggers Collective Against Censorship, which offered updates, ways around the block, and lists of government officials to call.

Conspiracy theorists were dumped in a separate thread. Slowly, as we received no responses, rude or inadequate, the anger grew.

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.