The Indian Department of Telecommunications (DoT) is planning to put in place a screening system to block Web sites and blogs perceived as threats to national security. DoT wants international long distance (ILD) carriers that own Internet gateways to take the responsibility of implementing the blockade.

The landing stations (Internet gateways) bring international bandwidth into India. There are three companies--VSNL, Reliance Communications and Bharti Airtel--which own eight landing stations in India. These ILD operators would be required to install equipment specified by DoT. The technology would be capable of blocking Web sites at a sub-domain level.

This will come as a major relief for ISPs which are carrying the burden to block URLs as of now.

The issue of blocking Web sites came into the limelight in July this year, when DoT directed ISPs to ban 18 blogs and Web sites. Some of the banned blogs were hosted on Blogger.com, the URLs of which were sub-domains of blogspot.com. As the ISPs were not able to block the specific sub-domains, they implemented the ban at the domain level. This resulted in all blogspot.com blogs hosted by Blogger.com becoming inaccessible. Public outcry and international criticism followed.

According to this story, the ILD operators were concerned that any attempt to filter and block URLs would lead to a substantial slowing down of Internet speeds.

The ILD operators objected to the DoT recommendations on implementing a URL blockade with the following arguments.

• Would slow the download speeds


• Infringes freedom of speech


• Impossible to monitor since objectionable content can be easily moved to another URL


• Few countries have implemented such a system


• Expensive technology