Saturday, March 12, 2011

Will Indian blogs be censored like China?

The new changes in Indian IT act proposes draconian laws to censor content being posted. The proposed rules are incredibly sweeping and can affect anything from Huffington post to this blog.
The overemphasis on blogs, indicating the government's anxiety to control them; the ‘vagueness' of the reasons for which the government can block websites; and the utterly regressive move of introducing ‘intermediary due-diligence,' a favourite tool of repressive regimes against bloggers, is upsetting, says Shivam Vij, journalist, Kafila.

Simply put this will be a challenge to censor every one. But if implemented will cause a lot of hassles for the common blogger.
“The Internet community will always end up being smarter. India does not control the rest of the web, and people can write blog posts by sending just an email. The lesser fortunate ones will end up facing the ham-handed fist of these new guidelines,” Krish Ashok, a Chennai-based blogger

2 comments:

Xinhua Ram said...

Unrelated, but still on the topic of China and Censorship:

Dalai Lama to formally step down today

Indian Express

IBN-Live

NDTV

China's Mouthpiece

Vidyut said...

My blog seems to be banned by some providers. My traffic has come down to a fifth of what it was, and I am not able to access my blog at all, though it is up and running and I can see it with a proxy. The funny part is that I don't have anything illegal on it, and even though I have written on political matters and criticized the government on many matters, I have not spoken against any party in particular, nor have I written anything against the interest of the country. The block seems to be from government controlled ISP more than others - MTNL+BSNL have come to near zero.

It is extremely concerning if simple criticism can get you completely silenced unnoticed by the internetizens, because your website just shows a page missing error.

In effect, it is silencing of dissent.