Indian Government blocks 60+ adult websites, citing violation of the Information Technology (IT) Rules, 2021

It looks like the Indian government has banned an additional 67 porn websites in the country. This follows an earlier ban wherein the government blocked around 800 porn websites. The ban was ordered by a Pune and Uttarakhand court based on a judgement made in 2018. The Department of Telecommunications issued four letters to all internet service providers ordering them to ban the said sites. 

The Government of India has blocked 63 porn websites/URLs in India, as per an order of the Ministry of Communications.

— ANI (@ANI) September 29, 2022

The DoT order stated, “MeitY in compliance of the said (Uttarakhand High Court) order read along with rule 3(2)(b) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, and in view of certain obscene material available in the below-mentioned website that tarnishes the image of modesty of women, has directed to immediately take down (block) the … websites/URLs,’. 

In an earlier report, we stated that according to Top10VPN, the number of VPN (Virtual Private Network) downloads grew a staggering 405% in the 12 months since the adult website ban was enforced. The data was analysed from Apple’s App Store as well as the Google Play Store. The Indian government has now banned 827 adult websites. At first, there was some outcry, mostly from adult websites that went on to circumvent the ban by changing their URLs. Certain sites changed the name from .com to .org or .net, and so on and so forth. But the Indian government got wise to this and banned these alternate URLs as well.

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Andrew Lu

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