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.
Read more »

According to "Blogging India: A Windows Live Report", 14 percent of Indian online users are active bloggers. If number of active Internet users in India is 25 million, then as per this report, the number of active bloggers in India ought to be 3.5 million.

The report was created by Windows Live Spaces based on a pan-Asian online survey of over 1,000 MSN portal visitors from India. The research was conducted online on the MSN portal across seven markets in Asia-- India, Hong Kong, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand.
Read more »