The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Orkut users livid over demands for ban

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Jun 12, 2007
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Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

Orkut users livid over demands for ban

Rasheed Kappan

STORM BREWING: Calls for a ban on the social networking site Orkut have kicked off a debate in cyberspace. — Photo: V. Sreenivasa Murthy

BANGALORE: A storm is brewing in the virtual world over the popular social networking site Orkut.com, India's second most visited portal. Derogatory remarks about Maratha icon Shivaji posted by certain communities on the site has triggered shrill cries to ban the portal. But as the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) decides whether to make the site inaccessible to everyone in the country, Orkut users are up against the latest attempt at "Internet regulation".

Bloggers, including Bangalore's young, Net-savvy generation, have teamed up against the proposed ban, holding aloft the flag of a free Internet. "The proposed ban is not a good idea at all. Technology works both ways. You have people who use it and those who abuse it. You can have hate communities on every website — Yahoo! chatrooms for instance — but you can't stop access to it," contends Mohammad Shakeel, an avid Orkut user and M.Phil. student at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore.

The site should not be blocked because it had many more good communities promoting social welfare, explains Ranjani M.S., an HR professional with Motorola.

Warns a blogger, "There are more than 25 Indian social networking sites (such as yaari.com, minglebox.com and bigadda.com), besides FaceBook and MySpace. The Government can't possibly go banning all these sites ... there's going to be a huge backlash from the youth of this country."

Now banned in Iran and Saudi Arabia, Orkut faced a ban threat in India when another community called "We Hate India" surfaced last year. The Bombay High Court's Aurangabad Bench even served notice on Google for allowing this "hate campaign" against the country.

But despite these developments, Orkut's popularity continued to grow, and it is now the second most visited site in India (according to website traffic tracker Alexa).

The fate of Orkut.com in India now is in the hands of CERT-In. The body was launched by the Government in 2004 to protect Internet networks of the defence forces, air and rail traffic and other vital establishments from individual or state-sponsored hackers inimical to the interests of India.

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