India "accidentally" cuts access to blogs

CNNMoney, The Browser
Jul. 20, 2006

The Indian government is now saying it simply meant to block a small number of inflammatory blog postings, but that overeager ISPs went too far. ABC News reports this morning that in "scrambling" to comply with an order to block 17 anti-Muslim web sites, "some of India's Internet service providers have simply blocked users from looking at entire domains such as blogspot.com - and the thousands of blogs, or online web journals, hosted there."

When it comes to censorship, bloggers are a touchy and enterprising lot. "Since I don't feel like linking to an mp3 of a wakeup call let me write this in caps - this is CENSORSHIP," wrote Neha Viswanathan who has been following the situation at withandwithout.com. "If this isn't censorship, I don't know what it is." Boing Boing has also joined the fray, offering a clearing house for rumors as well as strategies for "routing around" the blockage.

The government's response to the response has also been swift. In an email message sent to Columbia University journalism professor Sree Srinivasan, A.R. Ghanashyam, India's Deputy Consul in New York describes the inadvertent blocking of all blogs as "unfortunate" and says the "Department of Telecommunications have now clarified the issue and the error is being rectified and it is expected that normalcy in respect of blogs will soon be restored."

Of course, that does leave the question of whether the blogs actually targeted really did "create serious law and order problems," as Ghanashyam and the Indian government have maintained. Opinions anyone?