Fourteen days after the government asked Interent Service Providers (ISPs) to block access to four ‘‘offensive’’ blogs, India’s world-renowned computer techies have not been able to selectively ban only those websites. Instead, all of blogspot, geocities and typepad.com are only accessible in fits and starts throughout the country.

ISPs say this is due to technical constraints, but now, some experts are saying that the situation is more a sign of incompetence than technical constraints.

‘‘There are tools for ISPs to block websites selectively, but the skills to use those tools appear missing,’’ says Suresh Ramasubramanian, Manager, Antispam Operations, Outblaze Ltd. Hong Kong-based Outblaze Ltd is one of the world’s largest providers of e-mail services, with 40,000,000 active users.

Ramasubramanian believes that ISPs with backdated technology may have to spend between a few thousand to a few hundred thousand dollars to come up to date. However, he says, the long-term cost of not upgrading will be far higher.

‘‘ISPs have used sledgehammer approach in this ban, which is needed only when the volume of harmful traffic from a website—like spam or viruses—is far higher than the harmless content,’’ he adds.

Besides, there are other ways to block websites, one suggested by the ISP Association of India (ISPAI) in a July 19 advisory. It said that ISPs should ‘‘block sites at the DNS level’’. DNS servers are a small but essential part of the Internet that translate website names into numbers, like a mobile phone address book. With the ISPAI method, every time a banned website is requested, a surfer gets a ‘‘null’’ or ‘‘void’’ response, making the ban effective.

... contd.