14 DAY TRIAL // India has been having the same "problems" with the internet as the rest of the world. And, as in the rest of the world, the solution to those problems is simply to block parts of the internet in the hope that the "bad stuff" simply goes away, collateral damage be damned.
Unlike in some parts of the world, the government and authorities are busy blocking, censoring and filtering what they don't like.
The problem with this, as always, is that what some luddite politician who can barely operate a phone comes up with is hard to implement in practice.
Religious tensions in some parts of the country have given rise to violence. So the authorities figured they could just block the sites and people that spread the propaganda that led to the violence and be done with it. It sounds like a good idea, but of course it didn't work as planned.
ISPs were handed a list of some 300 URLs to block. Many of those were on popular websites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or WordPress. The authorities, having learned their lesson from the last time they tried this, specifically told the ISPs not to block Twitter, Facebook or YouTube entirely, just the URLs in question.
They figured that ISPs would understand that this means that only the URLs listed should be blocked. But that's giving ISPs too much credit since one took it upon itself to block WordPress.com entirely since some blogs were on the list.
WordPress.com hosts tens of millions of blogs and all became inaccessible via the Tata Photon ISP. It seems that other ISPs have also issued blank bans on full websites rather than just the URL named.
That's just half the problem. The other, of course, is that many of the URLs targeted had nothing to do with "spreading rumors" or inciting violence. Some URLs were actually for posts debunking the rumors. Others seem to have been adversaries and critics of the government. Censorship will always lead to this kind of problems, even with the best intentions. And intentions are very rarely purely good to begin with.