India is in an identical situation to the majority of the world when it comes to the internet. There are a lot of things that are deemed unacceptable and that are causing problems, so by blocking them the problems will all just vanish…
The Indian government has been busy blocking, censoring and filtering what they don’t like, whether it be copyright infringing materials, child exploitation or anti-government authors.
Religious tensions in some parts of the country have given rise to violence. So the authorities figured they could just block the sites and people that spread the propaganda that led to the violence. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t really work at all.
ISPs were handed a list of some 300 URLs to block. Many of those were on popular websites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or WordPress. The Indian authorities specifically told ISPs to block the infringing URLs not the sites they are hosted on.
The Tata Photon ISP is clearly more stupid than you might think. After reading the government instructions it blocked its users from accessing Wordpress.com completely. Other ISPs have also been reported as taking the same lazy measure.
Add to that the fact that many of the URLs that were expected to be blocked were highly contentious decisions anyway. Many were critics of the government and news blogs trying to decode the rumours of the spreading racial violence.
