The Government of India seems to have started blocking blogs hosted on popular blogging services such as Blogger, Typepad as well as sites hosted on Yahoo’s Geocities. Bloggers from all over India have posted their experiences of being unable to access these sites. These same sites are easily accessible from elsewhere. There is no official Government notification about the incident yet. But the scale of people affected by the event does not rule the Indian Government out. If it indeed is a government initiated action, whatever the reason, it sets a bad precedent and puts the largest democracy in the world on a road that can get very rough soon. Its important to note that no specific blog or site is being targeted and the blocking affects any site hosted on the affected domains. Hence this may not be censorship per se` which tries to restrict access to opposing thought. Whats taking place is a general blocking out of a mass-communication medium or atleast a large part of it. Censoring/blocking thoughts or access to a medium of expressing them will never help any cause good or bad. I hope the government reverses its policy at the earlier. Updates regarding this blocking can be found on the BloggerCollective, a Google Groups forum for discussions concerning the blocking. The organizers of the same group have also setup Wikis to provide updates here.

Update: IBNLive reports that the Indian Government has lifted the ban on blogs it had imposed a couple of days ago. It’s now understood that the Government had asked the ISPs to block certain specific blogs for their content, which amounts to censorship. But the ISPs ended up blocking entire domains. Either way it’s hard to find any justification for the Indian Government’s actions which has the potential to turn into a huge Public Relations disaster for them. With the step already taken once one can hardly trust the Government to refrain from doing the same again. Also the whole issue came to light because of the mistake on the part of the ISP’s. If the ISPs had done as the Government has asked and blocked only the specific web pages, I wonder if this censorship would have ever been known to the world. [via slashdot]