After the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) blocked access to the satirical website www.dowrycalculator.com last week, the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) has now filed a Right to Information application (read a copy here) seeking to know why the website was blocked, says a report on its website. It has also asked the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) to publicly disclose all website blocking orders in the interest of free speech (read a copy of its representation to MEITY here). IFF said it was tipped off about the block last week by Twitter user Rohit Verma (@rhnvrm) and upon monitoring this thread, found that the block has been inconsistently applied across ISPs. While Reliance Jio blocked the website, it is still available through Airtel and Vodafone. Also, IFF noted, there was no specific reason given for blocking the website, only the standard notice: “The URL has been blocked pursuant to direction of the Department of Telecom. Please contact administrator for more information.” IFF wrote that the content on Dowry Calculator made it “abundantly clear” that it was meant as satire, and that “this kind of inconsistency and opacity has now become characteristic of India’s website blocking regime”. IFF said that as part of its relaunch of Save the Internet, it has compiled a large, crowd-sourced database of website blocking and will use this data for future advocacy. It also said that is had made a formal representation to the DoT to investigate these crowd-sourced reports. The report also noted that…
