India’s Blocking Tech, Learning from China?
Yesterday, the Asian blogosphere was abuzz with the news that India had started blocking 18 or so major sites, including blogger.com and typepad.com. China-India competition is going a bit too far when India aspires to learn from China’s Internet filtering. Related to this, InfoWorld Nederland had an interesting quote related to China’s Great Firewall (GFW):
Under India’s Information Technology Act 2000, Web sites can be blocked if they are found to be promoting hate, violence, terrorism, and pornography including child pornography.
Although the communication from the DOT to ISPs lists specific pages and Web sites, several ISPs have blocked some key blogs altogether because they were not equipped to filter specific pages, Maheshwari said.
Also on Hindustan Times:
“Indian ISPs don’t have the technology to block individual name servers — say a particular blog hosted on Blogspot. So they had no choice but to block the root servers of major blogging networks — blogspot, geocities and typepad,” said a senior official in the IT Ministry. A senior official from an ISP confirmed this.
This point about “blocking precision” has been made before, but it merits repeating – the sophistication of China’s Internet filtering technology often, counterintuitively, allows more free access than in the past. Maheshwari’s comment shows that crude tools (ie. DNS blocks) often overblock, while fine-grained techniques more precisely address objectionable content, and allow all other information to flow. In a military analogy, think of it as carpet bombing vs. precision smart bombing.
The GFW has been under development and refinement for years in the PRC, yielding a number of blocking methods:
- by DNS name (*.blogger.com)
- by IP address (144.23.52.135)
- by URL keyword filtering (http://foo.blogspot.com/f*lung*ng.html)
- by Web page content filtering (sensitive word appearing in the web page)
It seems India’s ISPs, not experienced with blocking, have only option one at their disposal. It will be interesting to track how India evolves because of these demands. Will there be a lift on the ban because of its overblocking, or will there be a push by ISPs to implement China-style filtering?
Is there money to be made, or goodwill to be had, if China helps transfer this technology? Will India tap the expertise of computer science expertise at IIT, Hyderabad and Bangalore, the same folks leading India’s IT revolution?
With the recent Mumbai bombings, one can understand the government’s concern to swiftly thwart whatever communication channels might be relevant to terrorism. But if the price is long-term curbs on freedom of speech, then the Mumbai terrorists will have a much larger impact than even they expected.
