Indian government has finally realized the threat of the web, or actually the threat of few disturbing websites on the web.
Government sources announced interests in practising URL blocking on all international internet gateways linking to India. Currently there are 8 such gateways of which 5 are owned by VSNL (a part-government, a part-TATA enterprise), 2 owned by Reliance Infocomm, and 1 owned by Bharti network running Airtel broadband.
By way of this implementation, those website/blog URLs (or addresses) which have disturbing content for Indians, those that could pose a security threat, will be blocked at the international gateway level itself, which would prevent access to such websites in India.
It seems all this time, the government had implemented ban on such websites through service providers (ISPs) like AIRTEL, TATA or RELIANCE, and the ISPs which didn't have such infrastructure to block websites easily, blocked them at the domain level.
As this list of websites grew unmanageably large, ISPs due to mistakes or other problems, started blocking many normal websites occasionally. No wonder, the ISPs have now appreciated the government decision on implementing this themselves.
Is this good or bad?
Depends!
For the optimist reading this article, especially from outside India, its good news that such implementations are happening and this could probably eliminate a lot of current problems with blocked websites, and also allow for better monitoring on the Nation's security front.
For the pessimist (like me), especially people living in India (pessimistic can also be termed the 'realistic' approach when it comes to Indian government implementation of reforms), its going to become easier for politicians to bribe or frighten somebody and block websites like tehelka.com which has a reputation for exposing corruptive politicians time and again through online videos taken during secret sting operations. Once such a thing happens, it could probably take years in the courts for the website to get out of the blacklisted sites and continue operations.
