Websites can be blocked by people who have zero clue what they are about. Television programmes can be asked to censor everything from expletives to kissing scenes. (Try seeing Kill Bill with all violent scenes removed). Hell, Karnataka Govt. even tried to cap the price of movie tickets. [1]
The fact that a random litigation can persuade a judge to order to block 1000+ sites is downright scary. I don't see anything changing near future. Politicians (and even judiciary) rarely want to do away with any power they have.
[1]: http://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/kar...
While you may consider these powers authoritarian, there’s nothing inherently “socialistic” about them.
In the UK and US for example, censorship laws are often bundled into anti-terror legislation, which generally has its strongest proponents on the political right.
Not only does this happen in the US, it's legendary, and can lead to comedy gold:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4koLWPq2qDY
(Warning: clip contains uncensored expletives.)
> Hell, Karnataka Govt. even tried to cap the price of movie tickets.
This just sounds like a good thing to me.
The state government was under pressure from Kannada
organisations to cap movie tickets in multiplexes to Rs
200 so that a common man can afford to watch Kannada or
non-Kannada films even in [multiplexes]You can see this in action in New York with its rent controls: the government decided the common man needed to be able to afford housing. Seems like a noble goal, but soon landlords couldn't afford to fix their houses or pay for utilities, and so they left the market. And nobody was going to start a new apartment and nobody was going to fund one because it's unprofitable. As a result, the housing situation is even worse than how it was before.
You should realize that what you say here is very relative to your cultural context. Some other group could say "The max stipulation should be on what content is appropriate to which as demonstrate the ability to handle it" while another could say "where is there a max stipulation ? Why should they dictate something like that ?".
Also, our gov do censor a lot of things as well, by different mean. Using laws, economic influence, information flooding, etc.
I get that we should aim for as much freedom (and associated responsibility) as possible for the people, but your analysis that "Indian state wields too much power over everything. I guess it's remnant of a socialistic past." quite a shortcut.
I think its part of our culture, it begins in our childhood where our parents tell their kids that kids (even when they become adults) should blindly obey their parents.
This kind of board exist in almost every country I can think of.
Interestingly it seems to depend on the ISP used. Same site worked fine on a mobile connection.
With 1000 connections at 1 dns lookup per second that would be just 12 days. Anyone want to spin up some AWS instances in India and find out?
Last few lines of `curl --trace - https://thepiratebay.org/` on Jio ISP. Full log https://gist.github.com/anonymous/27ddfa674233d8d17a007f1b3f...
=> Send SSL data, 5 bytes (0x5)
0000: 15 03 03 00 1a .....
== Info: TLSv1.2 (OUT), TLS alert, Server hello (2):
=> Send SSL data, 2 bytes (0x2)
0000: 02 46 .F
== Info: error:1408F10B:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_RECORD:wrong version number
== Info: Closing connection 0
curl log does not show the last fake rcvd packet. Anyone know how to do that ?
[1] https://medium.com/@karthikb351/airtel-is-sniffing-and-censo...
Use HTTPS.
Imagine having a consortium of telecom companies deciding to charge $100/Gb of data (assuming they are making profit nevertheless). There is no incentive for them to reduce the price.
To give you an example, a movie ticket would cost upto $20 in an economy where a bottle of water costs ~$0.2.
Then why do you offer it?