Do they own the right on “Freedom to Express”? OR so they think

Just finished reading up my Times of India newspaper where an article stuck my eye. After the brutal Mumbai blasts of 7/11 where more than 250 people were killed and hundreds of others were severely injured, the DoT (Department of Telecom) for some good enough reason decided to block famous blogging websites including Blogspot and Typepad. As I discussed this with my colleagues at Wirkle they pointed me over to a Digg article and a blog http://www.gonomad.com/traveltalesfromindia/2006/07/what-is-up-with-blogspot-blogger-sites.html which had further discussions around this.

Some of the testimonials include:
“I contacted the Spectranet callcenter (a major ISP) and this is big, they confirmed that they have blocked the site because they have a letter from Ministry of communication! I wish I had heard it wrong. Call your ISP providers that are blocking it and check it out for yourself.”

“Amit cannot access blogspot and geocities from Airtel now. Looks like Airtel has joined in. Can more people confirm this; I will myself do so once I reach home. My home connection is Airtel. (I cannot access .blogspot domain now from my home ISP Airtel)”

Shivam Vij has written an interesting article at rediff: http://in.rediff.com/news/2006/jul/17blog.htm

To relate to this I can’t think of any other word than “Bizarre”. Such things were thought to be symbolic to a “Chinese Affair” with their communist government is known to be a master at such deeds. But since when did India become a New (a.k.a. Communist) China? What in the world could allow these people to try and prevent us on our right to express? Why are they blocking even those few bloggers? Do they have some facts which they want to hide from the public?

Well, thankfully we are in the same business and we will give a strong fight to the issue in all our capacity. We have started offering our mobile blog reading service LinkNSurf (www.linknsurf.com) for FREE to every mobile phone user. With LinkNSurf you would be able to search for all these blocked blogs, subscribe them and stay regularly updated with all the new happenings. Not only that I have created a new discussion community on LinkNSurf called “MumbaiBlasts” where everyone will be able to express their opinions, share blog articles and express themselves.