Blog Sites Blocked by Indian ISPs
Jace Kiran is only one of a number of people blogging about BlogSpot (and other sites) being blocked by Indian ISPs It appears that this is a knee jerk reaction to the Mumbai terrorist bombings designed to show that the government is taking action.
Whilst there are certainly censorship implications on this I think that the real issue here is that governments just don’t understand technology and yet they feel that they need to control it. Whether it is Senator Ted Stephens in the US describing the internet as a collection of tubes or attempts to get my local member to recognize the evils of DRM the level of technical knowledge by politicians is laughable at best and frightening at worst. Look at all the aspects of our lives that are regulated by technology and the importance it has in our society and compare that to the level of understanding by our lawmakers. The disconnect scares me a lot.
We might think that because this is India this will never happen in one of our western democracies but if we don’t do something about the level of ignorance by our politicians similar knee jerk catastrophies or worse could easily happen here.
Update: It appears as if the banning was simply a result of a large number of Indian ISP’s getting it wrong.
