Mending Wall: On the Implementation of Censorship in India
Devashish Gosain, Anshika Agarwal, Sahil Shekhawat, H. B. Acharya, and, S. Chakravarty

TL;DR
This study analyzes India's internet censorship infrastructure, revealing its decentralized implementation, potential for centralized control, and the significant collateral damage that a government-mandated censorship system could cause to global internet traffic.
Contribution
It provides a detailed analysis of India's current censorship practices, infrastructure centralization, and the feasibility and implications of implementing a unified government-controlled filter.
Findings
Indian ISPs implement diverse content filters leading to variable censorship.
A small number of key ASes intercept most censored traffic, enabling centralized filtering.
Federated censorship could cause widespread collateral damage to international traffic.
Abstract
This paper presents a study of the Internet infrastructure in India from the point of view of censorship. First, we show that the current state of affairs---where each ISP implements its own content filters (nominally as per a governmental blacklist)---results in dramatic differences in the censorship experienced by customers. In practice, a well-informed Indian citizen can escape censorship through a judicious choice of service provider. We then consider the question of whether India might potentially follow the Chinese model and institute a single, government-controlled filter. This would not be difficult, as the Indian Internet is quite centralized already. A few "key" ASes (approx 1% of Indian ASes) collectively intercept approx 95% of paths to the censored sites we sample in our study, and also to all publicly-visible DNS servers. 5,000 routers spanning these key ASes would suffice…
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Taxonomy
TopicsInternet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting · Network Security and Intrusion Detection · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics
