ban on blogs

I don’t know if you will be able to read this. If you are actually doing it, you are really lucky. You still live in a world where there exists a term called Freedom of Expression.

This may look like a suicide note, but it certainly is not. This is like those events, which we do not want to keep in our history, but still we have to keep them.

Government of India (by means of DOT) has ordered the ISPs in India to block many of the blogging sites. Officials from DOT have confirmed the news that DOT has issued a list of blogs and sites (22 of them infact) which had to be blocked. But what has actually happened is that all the blogs on some of the sites have been blocked. Sites like Blogspot, Geocities and many more are blocked, in turn resulting in no access to thousands of blogs on these sites.

Why the ban
Government says that blogs are used by terrorist and other anti social elements to network and plan unlawful activities. They also claim that many of the blogs have provocative material and they are portraying distorted views.

What next
It is such a sad decision. All the reasons given by government can be applied to mobile phone and print media also. Will the government ban those also? You never know.

Secondly blogs and internet is one medium which not everyone access to. Does the government think that by banning blogs it will be successful in its motives? Within moments of spread of news of blocking of blogs, there were many articles published on net which teach you how to still access this blogs. There are many proxies available today through which you can access any blog. Many of the MNCs have their servers and gateways outside India, thus the blocking wont happen in their offices.

The fact of the matter is that, people who are blogging are more mature and resourceful than what government thinks them to be. So its better that government actually try to solve the problems instead of zeroing on non-existing issues.

Some more reading on the same topic:
Indian Express
Digital Inspiration - This has lots of info on how to access the blogs now.
Hindu
Business Standard
Youth Curry