From time to time we hear that a totalitarian government has locked down Internet access for a part or all of their country. Normally, that is about all we hear about the situation. In the case of India, not normally thought of as a Totalitarian government, we have a unique opportunity to look at what they are censoring as they began to relax the total lockout of Internet services that was put into place in Jammu and Kashmir.
The "lift" of total censorship began on January 14th, when Internet Service Providers were ordered to install firewalls that would only allow access to 153 government-approved websites. As was pointed out by "The Wire", "No Mainstream News in List of 153 Whitelisted Websites Under Kashmir's First Govt Firewall." TheWire.in noted that "Conspicuously absent from the list that includes Gmail, Netflix, Zomato, Oyo Rooms and Paytm are news and social media websites."
The order from the "Principal Secretary to the Government, Home Department" to the ISPs stated that the Internet shutdown was because "there have been number of reports of the use of internet in cross border terrorism/terror activities, incitement, rumour-mongering, etc. as also misuse of pre-paid mobile connections by anti-national elements."
Internet Order
The total ban of Internet services remained in effect for "the districts of Srinagar, Budgam, Ganderbal, Baramulla, Anantnag, Kulgan, Shopian, and Pulwama. But for "all the 10 districts of Jammu division and to begin with the revenue districts of Kupwara & Bandipora of the Kashmir Valley" were allowed to have access to the list of 158 websites beginning on January 18th, 2020. (That list is available via Scribd here: "Temporary Suspension of Telecom Services" A week later, the list was amended to include not only many News sites, as TheWire had pointed out, but also a large list of "Utilities" which included movie theaters, car dealerships, shoe sales websites, and pizza delivery services.
The new expanded list is provided below in a searchable form (the original is an image-based scan.)
I would invite others to make relevant observations in the comments sections, or in your own publications linking back to this page. The list is intended to be a faithful representation of the new order, which can be found on the JK Home Office website as Home-05(TSTS) of 2020.
While the order has been commonly described as containing "300 URLs", there are a handful of duplicates, where a URL was included both with a trailing slash and without the slash. It should also be noted that there are a very large number of websites included by Top Level Domain, due to the inclusion of the TLDs: Ac.in (most academic institutions in India will be included here), Gov.in (most government offices and services in India will be included here), and Nic.in (most network infrastructure services from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology is included here.)
It is curious how it was decided which websites to include and not to include. For example, why include Adidas and Reebok, but not Nike? I'm sure the programmers are thrilled to see that Github and StackOverflow are included! What other observations strike you as interesting? Please comment or Tweet about them!
