All this seems to be a positive step towards providing a boost to thenascent state of the Indian internet industry. Except for a fewfundamentals and fatal flaws in the process -- which are revealed whenone examines who are the companies vying for this award, who are thevoters and who are the judges. As it happens, the voting system is farfrom secure -- an internet reader could access the contest site and voteas many times as required to ensure that the `chosen' site wins.

Apart from that the judging panel includes the top personalities ofMicroland, a supplier of products to the computer industry which alsohosts a site of its own, and Times of India, which also has a web site.Though their own sites cannot be up for the award, biases cannot beruled out towards prominent competitors.

There are other anamolies including the fact that Microland'sPlanetasia.com could take advantage of a bug in Microsoft InternetInformation Server (ASP bug) which is well documented by industryobservers. This gives access to user ID and password to SQL database.The India Internet Award nomination page, while accepting data from theuser and putting it on its server, has used active Server Pages (ASP)but has not considered the bug. Interested parties can thus enter the website and change nominations.