India bans Yahoo Groups site critical of government [fs]

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

Apparently the censorship order applied to only one Yahoo Groups list but 
some ISPs blocked the entire Yahoo Groups website. Some reportedly may have 
narrowed the block since then. Politech subscribers have pointed me to 
these useful discussions on a local mailing list (thanks, folks):

https://ssl.cpsr.org/pipermail/india-gii/2003-September/005110.html
Dishnet 
has blocked access to groups.yahoo.com since
13th September 2003 and on further enquiries tell me
that it is because Govt. of India has sent them a
directive to block specific Yahoo! Groups and since
Dishnet doesn't know how to do that, it has blocked
access to the entire URL http://groups.yahoo.com/

https://ssl.cpsr.org/pipermail/india-gii/2003-September/005116.html
I saw it a couple of days ago. I've asked for a scanned copy, which I
will hopefully be able to make available to the list.
The group in question is a list of some Indonesian anti-Indonesian
government group.

See also this coverage:
http://www.rediff.com/netguide/2003/sep/23yahoo.htm

-Declan

---

Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2003 08:26:03 -0400 (EDT)
From: "John F. McMullen" <observer () westnet com>
To: "johnmac's living room" <johnmacsgroup () yahoogroups com>
cc: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
Subject: India blocks access to Yahoogroups

>From Cyberia -- I pasted in the whole story
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Arvind T. Thattai <a.thattai () UEA AC UK>
To: CYBERIA-L () LISTSERV AOL COM

Folks,

As of Monday, internet users in India can no longer access
Yahoogroups following a government order requiring all ISPs to block
the site.  The government's request was confined to a specific
group, run by a seccessionist organisation.  ISPs responded by
blocking access to the entire cite, claiming they are unable to
block only a particular group.

If memory serves right, the last attempt by the Indian government to
control the net (by blacklisting the websites of several Pakistani
newspapers) was quietly dropped after a number of Indian sites
hosted overseas began mirroring the sites in question.  It will be
interesting to see how this particular round develops.

The story is here:

http://web.mid-day.com//news/city/2003/september/64623.htm

'Anti-national' Yahoo Groups blocked
By Shibu Thomas

Cyberspace users in India are up in arms against the government. For the
first time since the Information Technology Act, 2000, was introduced, the
government has banned a site, Yahoo Groups, for publishing anti-government
material. Many netizens believe the government is trying to gag the
Internet, a medium for free flow of information.

On Monday, when Yahoo users tried to access Yahoo Groups, they got error
messages saying the site had been blocked. Neville Taraporewala, who heads
yahoo.coms India operations said, We received no communication from the
government. We realised Yahoo Groups had been blocked when users started
calling us. On checking with the Internet Service Providers (ISPs), we
came to know the government had told them to block the site.

The government move came stealthily. In a notification dated August 10,
2003, Jayant Kumar, director, DoT, asked ISPs to block
groups.yahoo.com/groups/kynhun for promoting anti-national news and
containing material against the Government of India and the state
government of Meghalaya. The Kynhun Group, which has barely 25 members and
a total of 20 messages, is run by an organisition called Hynniewtrep
International Liberation Council.

Though some of the messages call for independence, many of them are about
corruption, police brutality against minorities and lack of public
infrastructure.

A VSNL spokesperson said, If the government issues a notification, the
ISPs have to fall in line. However, since the technology to block a
particular group is complicated, ISPs have completely blocked access to
the whole of Yahoo Groups.

[...]

What is banned
The government wanted the Kynhun Group banned from cyberspace. But ISP
blocked Yahoo Groups  a service provided by Yahoo, where users can form
their own groups to share ideas and information.

[...]
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