India orders ISPs to block Github, Dailymotion, Pastebin, Vimeo, and 30 other websites
Pastebin, Dailymotion, Github blocked after DoT order: Report — NEW DELHI: A number of Indian users are reporting they're not able to access websites such as Pastebin, DailyMotion and Github …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Department of Telecommunications' order puts the block at the ISP level rather than asking sites to remove content — a blunt instrument that sweeps in developer infrastructure like GitHub, which Indian engineers rely on daily. Within two days, New Delhi partially walked it back, lifting Vimeo, Dailymotion, Weebly and Github Gist while leaving 28 of the original list banned (the January reversal), suggesting the initial scope outran whatever specific concern prompted it.
First-order effects
- Millions of Indian developers, designers, and pastebin users lose access to core workflow tools overnight, with no notice from the sites themselves since the cut happens at the ISP level.
Second-order effects
- The rapid partial reversal shows the government calibrating under pressure, but the 28 sites left blocked establish that once a block list exists, full restoration is never automatic — and ISPs absorb the compliance cost of churn on and off lists.
Third-order effects
- This episode is the template for a decade-long escalation in India's blocking toolkit: the same state that fumbled a blanket 32-site ISP order later invoked its IT Act's emergency powers to ban 20 YouTube channels, ordered app-store-level blocks on streaming services (Ullu and ALTT among them), and ultimately went upstream to make GitHub itself pull an app used by protestors (Bitchat) — moving from access denial at the network edge to content removal at the source.
The trend: India is shifting internet control from blunt ISP-level site blocking toward targeted, platform-level removal requests, with each successive mechanism more surgical than the last.