Friday, September 26, 2003
Big Brother is blocking you
I have been following this absurd story for a few days now. The Indian govt's Dept of Telecom has effectively blocked all access to Yahoo groups from India. The alleged reason is that some Meghalayan separatist outfit was running a group (if 32 messages over a year's time can be called that). So here we have a self-proclaimed IT powerhouse resorting to the basest form of censorship, and in the proces blocking access to perfectly legitimate users of Yahoo groups. What is the Indian govt thinking? If solving political disputes were as easy as blocking a Yahoo website, India should not have any more outstanding disputes. I cannot understand why the Indian govt would choose the Saudi, Iranian or Chinese govts as role models when it comes to free flows of information.
