How many URLs/Websites are blocked in India? Government gives different answers

[shubhamjain]

Indian state wields too much power over everything. I guess it's remnant of a socialistic past. Consider this: CBFC is film certification board that can block a movie's release until appropriate cuts are made subject to their whims and fancies. This makes no logical sense. Why should the Govt. interfere in whatever the movie wants to show? The max stipulation should be on what content is appropriate to which age group.

Websites can be blocked by people who have zero clue what they are about. Television programmes can be asked to censor everything from expletives to kissing scenes. (Try seeing Kill Bill with all violent scenes removed). Hell, Karnataka Govt. even tried to cap the price of movie tickets. [1]

The fact that a random litigation can persuade a judge to order to block 1000+ sites is downright scary. I don't see anything changing near future. Politicians (and even judiciary) rarely want to do away with any power they have.

[1]: http://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/kar...

[confounded]

Many countries have film certification boards with similar powers, though they tend to be lenient. Same for web and television censorship.

While you may consider these powers authoritarian, there’s nothing inherently “socialistic” about them.

In the UK and US for example, censorship laws are often bundled into anti-terror legislation, which generally has its strongest proponents on the political right.

[icebraining]

The power to block movie releases is common. For example, A Serbian Film "has been banned in Spain, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, Norway, and South Korea, and was temporarily banned from screening in Brazil."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Serbian_Film

[Tech-Noir]

> Television programmes can be asked to censor everything from expletives

Not only does this happen in the US, it's legendary, and can lead to comedy gold:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4koLWPq2qDY

(Warning: clip contains uncensored expletives.)

> Hell, Karnataka Govt. even tried to cap the price of movie tickets.

This just sounds like a good thing to me.

    The state government was under pressure from Kannada
    organisations to cap movie tickets in multiplexes to Rs
    200 so that a common man can afford to watch Kannada or
    non-Kannada films even in [multiplexes]

[sametmax]

> Why should the Govt. interfere in whatever the movie wants to show? The max stipulation should be on what content is appropriate to which age group.

You should realize that what you say here is very relative to your cultural context. Some other group could say "The max stipulation should be on what content is appropriate to which as demonstrate the ability to handle it" while another could say "where is there a max stipulation ? Why should they dictate something like that ?".

Also, our gov do censor a lot of things as well, by different mean. Using laws, economic influence, information flooding, etc.

I get that we should aim for as much freedom (and associated responsibility) as possible for the people, but your analysis that "Indian state wields too much power over everything. I guess it's remnant of a socialistic past." quite a shortcut.

[sumedh]

> Indian state wields too much power over everything

I think its part of our culture, it begins in our childhood where our parents tell their kids that kids (even when they become adults) should blindly obey their parents.

[realusername]

> CBFC is film certification board that can block a movie's release until appropriate cuts are made subject to their whims and fancies

This kind of board exist in almost every country I can think of.

[nsomaru]

I've found non-https archive.org (!) to be blocked in India on a government ISP.

Interestingly it seems to depend on the ISP used. Same site worked fine on a mobile connection.

[nitin_flanker]

Yes, as far as I've tried, it entirely is ISP dependent. Here's the message that my ISP show when a website is blocked: http://ibb.co/mvSMRR. I can access it however using my Wifi instead. Similarly, few website that are blocked by one are accessible on others carriers.

[akerro]

OONIProble is a project from TorProject group, that tests your network connection for possible censorship, MITM and network manipulation https://f-droid.org/packages/org.openobservatory.ooniprobe/

[timthelion]

Aren't there few enough urls that are registered that it should be easy to figure out which ones are blocked? It looks like there are only about a billion http://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/

With 1000 connections at 1 dns lookup per second that would be just 12 days. Anyone want to spin up some AWS instances in India and find out?

[zuron7]

Not worth it. The blocking that the government uses blocks only the http version of the sites. Append an s manually and access is restored. But to the uninitiated that block poses enough of a challenge.

[forkLding]

The rationale for blocking websites is pretty convoluted, what are they saying? I mean aside from the usual censorship justification

[nischalsamji]

"Objectionable content", "Hurting religious sentiments" are the reasons given when github/ vimeo/ pastebin etc., were banned few years ago. The rationale is pretty vague and it's often tough to understand on what info a certain site gets blocked.

[Ravisg]

Blocked sites can easily be accessed using proxy or vpn. I end up doing that on a regular basis :)

[therealmarv]

I heard once that Cloudflare is widely blocked in some countries. Does somebody know any specifics?

[prashnts]

Particular to India, Cloudflare edge data-centres use Airtel network — which is notorious for using MITM for arbitrary bans. If cloudflare fetches your site without SSL then Airtel can and does block it and even inject ads; this is regardless if you use cloudflare's https to serve content to your clients. More info here [1], and hn discussion here [2].

[1] https://medium.com/@karthikb351/airtel-is-sniffing-and-censo...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12091900

[senthilnayagam]

during a major movie release, court backed banning of thousands of torrent and media sharing sites happen