After days of ducking the press, the Indian government finally addressed its blog ban. SAJA just released this email from the Indian deputy consul general in NYC. How silly is it that policy affecting free speech in India has to be routed through New York and bypassed via Pakistan?

… A two-page write up containing extremely derogatory references to Islam and the holy prophet which had the potential to inflame religious sensitivities in India and create serious law and order problems in the country appeared in a blog facilitated by well-known search engines…

… instructions were also issued to all Internet providers to block the two impertinent pages. Because of a technological error, the Internet providers went beyond what was expected of them which in turn resulted in the unfortunate blocking of all blogs.

Department of Telecommunications have now clarified the issue and the error is being rectified and it is expected that normalcy in respect of blogs will soon be restored.

… A.R. Ghanashyam
Deputy Consul General
New York

This statement passes the buck to ISPs, but early press reports were that the government asked that the entire Blogspot and Typepad domains be blocked. We still haven’t heard the ISPs’ side yet, but if this is in fact their mistake, it’s a monumental cock-up.

Technical details

Google’s Blogspot servers use IP multihoming, meaning a single IP address resolves to all blog subdomains hosted on Blogspot. Typepad may be similar. The ISPs blocked the IP address instead of filtering by subdomain or URL.

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