India’s Decentralized System of Internet Censorship
The internet in India is often celebrated for its scale and diversity. Yet, beneath the veneer of Digital India lies a complex, often invisible, infrastructure of control. For over a decade, civil society and technical researchers have attempted to map the contours of Indian internet censorship. Two significant bodies of work— foundational research by Kushagra Singh, Gurshabad Grover, and Varun Bansal, and the more recent, granular analysis by Karan Saini in “Poisoned Wells: Examining the scale of DNS Censorship in India”—now provide us with a detailed view of this architecture.
Together, these studies suggest that the Indian state’s censorship apparatus is not a centralized “Great Firewall” in the Chinese mold. Instead, it is a decentralized, technically inconsistent, and profoundly opaque system that delegates enforcement to private Internet Service Providers (ISPs). By hijacking the Domain Name System (DNS), the very phonebook of the internet, the Indian state has created a regime of censorship that is pervasive and largely unaccountable.
Related Knowledge Center: Free speech and public protest
The First Amendment is facing challenging times: Crackdowns on campus protests prompted both-sides claims of intolerance. Attempts to head off dangerous health misinformation have been characterized as violations of free speech. Donald Trump is publicly punishing news outlets that deviate from his administration’s version of events while privately suing some outlets into submission.
The White House vs. the press | Voiceless America
Related Knowledge Center: Information integrity
In an increasingly fractured media landscape, truth has been a casualty in the public discussion. Coverage has been warped by the business needs of struggling news organizations, and a significant segment of the public relies on bad-faith outlets that are little more than propagandists. While fact-checking has become routine, some organizations are exploring other ways to combat the trends. And misinformation spewed by AI-driven chatbots has become more of a feature than simply a bug.
Fact-checking and its detractors