India to ban SNS? April Fool’s, maybe

Could be an April Fool’s joke on the part of India-based Tech2.com, but the site reports that India’s Home Affairs Ministry is considering banning overseas-based social-networking sites and requiring domestic ones to “maintain records of all user activity including ‘change of status, profile picture, favorite sitcoms etc.’.” Here’s the part that’s suspicious in comedic terms: “Intelligence operatives are of the belief that Jehadi terror cells could work out a sophisticated system of communication by ‘throwing sheep’ at each other using a site such as Facebook.com whose servers the Indian government cannot access.” Foreign sites such as Google’s Orkut, MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, and LinkedIn would be blocked by a government directive to Indian Internet service providers. Popular India-based social sites the story mentions include BigAdda.com, Yaari.com, and Minglebox.com. If all this is serious, other government certainly will be watching to see if this kind of control over the participatory Web is possible, but I have a feeling teen users would find workarounds.