Prudes may say, cut it. But given the wide internet porn options and its easy access, firewalling it is certainly easier said than done. With over 33% of all internet traffic attributed to porn (and porn-linked sites), it would take a beyond super-human effort to ensure that people can have access to the internet, but not porn.
There are two ways of blocking it technically - removing the content from the internet, which is possible only if the content is illegal in the country it is being hosted; or by getting the internet service providers to block access to those websites. The government has largely relied on the latter in the past, and this was how it was possible to block porn web comic savitabhabhi.com in 2009. However, the site simply changed its URL and continued to operate.
“Technologically, it is impossible to ban pornography. To ban porn and track people viewing it, the government would also have to ban proxy servers and make Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) illegal,” says internet expert Roy George. He further states that, in order to block content, all an Internet Service Provider (ISP) like Airtel or BSNL has to do is to check the URL against a blacklist of banned sites, to decide whether the user should be accessing it. The same technology can be used to track people watching banned content as well. Every web page has a unique URL, which means the government could block a specific page or an entire site, depending on the amount of detail in the blacklist. But, this doesn’t remove the content from the internet, as it is still possible to use proxies and VPNs to access the sites.