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Mapping the intricacies of the World Wide Web's no easy task
[December 17, 2006]

Mapping the intricacies of the World Wide Web's no easy task


(The Economic Times (India) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) : Indian government is trying to censor the Internet. But can it really prevent the Web from spreading? The government is even trying to monitor VOIP calls, but a new VOIP service provider pops up every second.



Internet is a vast network of servers with trillions of packets flowing through it every second, thus making it impossible to monitor these individual packets of data. If a website is blocked at one IP address, it will pop up at another. If one VoIP provider is blocked, there are million others to take its place.

Hence, experts believe that total censorship of information on the Internet is almost impossible to achieve. Pseudonymity and data havens continue to allow unconditional free speech on the Internet.


Says Mr Anupam Mittal, chairman and MD, People Group which runs the social networking site Fropper.Com, "The government blocks websites using Internet protocol filters, however, anonymisers, URL redirection services, anonymous surfing via a proxy server are very popular among general Internet users in these countries to bypass the banned content."

Content can never be checked and the Indian government seems to learn this the hard way. Earlier this year, the Maoist website www.peoplesmarch.com was blocked under government directions. The site went off the Internet for a short period and then popped up as http://peoplesmarch.googlepages.com.

The homepage of the site asserts the right to free speech and condemns India's censorship attempts. The government can again block this site but they have put up all their content on another site http://peoplesmarch.wordpress.com for just such an eventuality.

Krishna Prasad of MSN India says, "Content can never be controlled on the Internet, there are so many different ways to put the same content on different places. False IDs, masked IPs and other technologies allow you to keep shifting content all the time."

Adding to the worries of containing the websites, now the department of telecom is working on a proposal for monitoring and monetising unlicenced Internet telephony providers. But then again there are options to services like Skype.

According to Mr Mittal, "Jingle, which operates on open protocol, is the best alternative to VoIP services like Coccinella, Google Talk, Kopete and Tapioca use Jingle in their voice services." Moreover, VoIP providers can even have caller IDs as this can be easily forged by VoIP engines.

A majority of VoIP services do not support encryption making impossible to trace them, he told ET. Meanwhile, Mr Prasad argues for better utilisation of such services. "Countries like the UK and the US are encashing on VoIP by promoting its use for the SMEs as international calls to places like China are expensive for this category of users.

So the ideal way would be to take a cue from such countries and allow VoIP to develop in India rather than blanking out services," he says. Moreover, sites like clickatell.com and hotfoon.com allow for sending SMS and make calls to mobile phones that allow calling using the Internet without allowing the security agencies to monitor them.

Explaining that one cannot be omnipresent and monitor everything on the Net, Mr Deep Kalra, founder and CEO, makemytrip.com, feels: "The authorities can keep a vigil on the bigger BPO players having 10-20,000 seating but there are many other small call centres in far flung areas of the country, and mostly unregistered, how can you eye them all?"

So how did the rest of the world deal with censorship? The Chinese government works with the search engines, both international like http://www.yahoo.com.cn and Google China as well as domestic ones such as Baidu, to filter search results of certain objectionable terms.

Then, there is Saudi Arabia which directs all international Internet traffic through a proxy farm located in King Abdulaziz City. Additionally, a number of sites are blocked according to two lists maintained by the Internet Services Unit.

But there are ways around every system. As Mr Kalra points out, users have always found other ways to access censored content. With proxy server sites like Kproxy, anonymouse.com. Hidemyass.com, chances of getting caught are further reduced.

Copyright 2006 The Economic Times of India, Coleman & Co Ltd. Source : Financial Times Information Limited

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