Has India Banned Yahoo Groups?

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the seems-a-bit...-excessive dept

I’ve been reading a bunch of different articles on this one, and I’m still not exactly sure what happened. Much of the US press is claiming that the Indian government has blocked access to a single Yahoo Group espousing anti-government views. Free speech, politics and basic censorship aside, these reports make it sound as if this single, extremely low traffic group (I mean, it’s had 24 posts this entire year as of my writing this) was all that got blocked. However, reports out of India are saying that ISPs, instead are blocking all Yahoo Groups. Of course, just like any online censorship, this plan is backfiring in that it’s drawing a hell of a lot more attention to this group than if they just left it alone – where it would have remained mostly ignored.