Slashdot Mirror
India Blocks Yahoo Groups Over Political Content
Ryan Barrett writes "In an attempt to shut down the Yahoo Group of a separatist political
movement, the Indian government's
CERT organization ended up blocking its country from accessing Yahoo Groups as a
whole. China's censorship of the Internet in the past few years has been
unsettling, but most people have accepted it as a by-product of China's form of
government. Given that India's form of government is clearly different, this is
much more chilling."
Sep 29, 10:47 AM (ET)
By S. SRINIVASAN
BANGALORE, India (AP) - A government ban on an Internet discussion group run by an obscure Indian separatist movement has ended up blocking hundreds of unrelated Yahoo forums, preventing nearly all of India from using the popular online service.
"This is more like a dictatorship and goes against the concept of freedom of speech," said Sushil Devaraj, a businessman who regularly uses Yahoo discussion groups to discuss programming issues for a low-cost computer called the Simputer.
Over the past two weeks, India's dozens of Internet service providers have been notified by the government to block access to a Yahoo discussion group called "Kynhun - Bin U Hynniladenewtrep."
The group, which has about two dozen members, is run by a separatist group called Hynniebinwtrep International Liberation Council. The little-known organization says it represents the ethnic Khasi people and wants their home region, a small slice of the country's northeast, to secede from India.
Efforts to contact the group were unsuccessful.
Web sites like Yahoo, Google, or MSN allow users to create and subscribe to electronic discussion forums, where members can exchange views. The groups are used for everything from keeping in touch with friends to discussing politics and home repair.
India's Computer Emergency Response Team, a section of the Information Ministry that normally deals with hackers and virus attacks, ordered the discussion group blocked in mid-September for "promoting anti-national news and containing material against the government."
But for technical reasons, Indian Internet service providers were unable to block just the Kynhun site - and had to shut down every Yahoo discussion group. Other sections of the Yahoo Web site, such as its Internet explorer and news areas, were unaffected.
"We had to comply immediately," David Appaslinamy, spokesman of Sify, India's largest Internet service provider, said Monday.
Reporters Without Limits, an advocacy group for press freedom, criticized the ban and called for it to be rescinded.
"Blocking a few Web pages can result in the blocking of hundreds of other Web pages that have nothing to do with the banned content," said Robert Menard, the group's secretary general.
While uncommon, the Indian government has occasionally blocked Web sites it finds objectionable, including one for a Pakistani newspaper during India-Pakistan fighting in 1999.
Indian users found their favorite groups suddenly inaccessible in recent days.
"My students have a problem. I discuss their problem with them on the Yahoo groups. We have not been able to do it," said Rajeev Gowda, an economics professor at the Indian Institute of Management in the southern high-tech city of Bangalore.
"This heavy-handed action has affected a variety of users who have nothing to do with that group," Gowda said Monday.
The Internet Service Providers Association of India suggested to U.S.-based Yahoo that it deactivate the Kynhun group.
"But they wrote back saying they may not be able to do it. Indian service providers are obliged to block the group under Indian laws. But U.S. laws are different," said P.V. Ramdas, a member of the association's decision-making executive council.
Internet service providers said they were trying to fine tune their blocking mechanisms to allow access to other Yahoo discussion groups and prevent other sites from disclosing information about the ban, though none appeared to be successful by Monday evening.
Where was the so called first amendment when the website of Al Jazeera was taken down after the Department of Defense called it unpatriotic.
As dangerous as blind, broad, sweeping censorship is, I think that people may err when they immediately assume all censorship in all forms is bad.
Surely there may be situations where some censorship may be considered appropriate by the majority.