Indian lawmakers simply don’t want the country’s citizens to watch adult content online. But, well, there’s not much they can do to effectively implement their wishes.
On Oct. 27, the Indian government’s telecom department told internet service providers (ISPs) to ban 827 websites for hosting pornographic content.
This is at least the second attempt in recent times by India, among the most prolific consumers of porn, to shut it out. In August 2015, following a supreme court verdict, the government had unsuccessfully tried to block some 857 websites on the grounds that such content promotes sexual ssault.
This time, the high court of the northern state of Uttarakhand has reinstated the supreme court’s ban after a rape accused in the state’s capital Dehradun said he was nudged into committing the crime after watching a porn movie.
Whatever be the court’s intentions, it’s practically impossible to stop Indians from consuming online porn content.
Just days after the government diktat to the ISPs, the world’s biggest porn website, Pornhub, launched a mirror site with a slightly altered web address or URL, just for its Indian users.
“There are no laws against pornography in India and watching adult content privately. It’s evident that the Indian government does not have a solution to a very serious and systemic problem in the country, and is using adult sites like ours as a scapegoat,” said Corey Price, vice-president at Pornhub. “For the government to ban sites like ours that have compliant parental controls, a non-consensual take down page, and a strict terms of service is a disservice to the people of India, who have become one of the largest connoisseurs of adult content.”
Meanwhile, the ban is being mocked brutally on social media.
No stopping us
For the world’s third-biggest porn-watching nation (after the US and the UK), the mobile traffic share to Pornhub has grown 121% between 2013 and 2017, the highest for any country.
But Indians don’t rely only on such porn websites for adult content. The internet is afloat with plenty of options.
In any case, there are easy ways to circumvent the ban itself. There are hoards of proxy websites—Hidester, Hide.me, Whoer.net, and Anonymouse—for that.
Moreover, even the internet ban is not really foolproof as users can still access the banned portals on some browsers—the UC browser being the most popular.
For those who are not savvy, access to porn is probably just a few footsteps away given the massive grey market of offline pornography. A porn DVD can be bought in India for as little as Rs30 ($0.41). Nowadays vendors also offer to upload porn on a flash drive for similar rates.
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