The Department of Telecommunications in India, has blocked 32 websites in the country today.
The list of websites blocked include the popular video portal Vimeo, online text storing service Pastebin, Git repository hosting service GitHub, and the open source software repository Sourceforge.
Pastebin had originally announced that India had begun blocking their service on December 19th, and later confirmed it again on December 26th. It appears that the sites were blocked under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000.
You can find the full list of websites that have banned, in the tweet embedded below:
Though an official announcement as to why DoT blocked the sites was not made, the Head of BJP’s National IT Cell, Arvind Gupta, tweeted the following:
Despite reports that the websites are no longer accessible in the country, we could access several of them without any issues. It is unclear why the Government has blocked websites which have a relatively smaller userbase compared to social networking websites such as Facebook, twitter and Google+ where the offensive posts have been found on a larger scale.
The decision to block popular websites especially GitHub which is used for software development, has drawn flak from Indian users, who took to Twitter to express their frustration.
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