India’s new porn ban is absurdly easy to get around
Pornhub, the world’s most popular porn site, has come up with a way to circumvent the plan by India’s government plan to block online porn that cut off access to its third biggest market.
An order from the Uttarakhand High Court last month instructed all internet service providers in the country to take “immediate necessary action for blocking 827 websites” that hosted pornographic content.
TheNextWeb writes
by what users are reporting it seems they’re actually putting the ban into effect. However, Indians aren’t giving up and users are finding easy ways to circumvent the major porn block.
While some users are finding alternative links, others are using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) or proxy services like ‘hide.me’ to access these sites. There are even specific browsers like UC browser, where the banned sites are working. Interestingly, Pornhub launched its own VPN back in May— which is truly helpful in these trying times.
Meanwhile, TorrentFreak observed that many Indians are changing their DNS to Google’s or Cloudflare’s free service. It also noted that searches for VPN in India have gone up.
In response to the censorious actions of some governments, Pornhub has now set up a ‘mirror’ website that uses a web domain not included in the list of banned sites, allowing Indian-based users to continue to access adult content from the popular pornography website.
PornHub said in a statement that the latest ban poses a risk to internet users in India who will be forced to seek content from untrusted websites.
Corey Price, VP of Pornhub said in a statement
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.
This is apparent by the fact that they only banned large sites like Pornhub’s, and didn’t block thousands of risky porn sites that may contain illegal content. 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.
While we are anti-government censorship here at Pornhub, and ultimately disappointed in the ruling, we are willing to work alongside the government to address any concerns they have and help rectify the situation. In the meantime, to provide our Indian users with Pornhub content again as quickly as possible, we have set up a mirror site. We understand this has been a hard time for our fans and hope this will provide them with an outlet to help alleviate some of their stress.
According to The Independent,
India is the third largest consumer of Pornhub content behind the United States and the United Kingdom, according to data taken from 2017. This is despite a similar online pornography ban that was enacted in the country in 2015 “on the grounds of decency and morality”.
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