HYDERABAD: A fortnight before Independence Day, India joined the glorious company of nanny nations as an apparent ban on online porn sites was in evidence.
Netizens across the country woke up to the ban when some users of reddit, reported their experiences while trying to browse porn sites and linked it to their ISPs, which included Hathway, BSNL, MTNL, Vodafone and ACT. Some users of Airtel, Tikona and Tata reported they were able to access the adult sites.
One user trying to open vodlocker got the message: “Your requested URL has been blocked as per the directions received from Department of Telecommunications, Government of India. Please contact the administrator for more information.” Not all the porn sites were affected. But the nearly 100 sites which became inaccessible were the popular ones, according to Alexa ranking system.
Also Read: Hyderabadis Outraged By Porn Ban
However, adult video sharing sites have also become inaccessible. Youtube and vimeo though remained accessible. By Saturday midnight and wee hours of Sunday, #pornban was trending with ribald jokes and foul language about everyone ranging from the PM to the apparent Leader of Opposition. Interestingly, it was only a fortnight back that the Chief Justice of India refrained from issuing an interim order on a batch of petitions seeking ban on porn.
Chief Justice HL Dattu, in oral comments, said: “Such interim orders cannot be passed by this court. Somebody can come to the court and say ‘Look, I am an adult and how can you stop me from watching it within the four walls of my room? It is a violation of Article 21 (right to personal liberty) of the Constitution.’ Yes the issue is serious and some steps need to be taken… the Centre has to take a stand... let us see what stand the Centre will take.”
The CJI, heading a three-judge Bench, gave the home ministry four weeks to file an affidavit. But looks like the DoT has jumped the gun.
There was no official word on the ban beyond the lack of access being reported by users. Being a Sunday, officials of DoT could not be contacted.
While some users reported seeing error .403 access denied or forbidden when they hit URLs of popular porn sites, others got blank pages, while a few others reported seeing the “This site has been blocked as per the instructions of competent authority”.
Based on usage statistics, a study done with collaboration of pornhub, ranked Indian women second in the world for accessing porn, right behind Brazil. It said 30 percent of Indian women are accessing porn using analytics software.
This ban got the goat of not just the usual suspects of porn use.
Ram Gopal Varma summed up the irony of the ban with: “To ban porn saying it will be seen by who shouldn’t see it is like saying to stop traffic because there will be accidents.” The last is yet to be heard about the ban.
Some of the banned sites
xvideos.com
Pornhub.com
Xhamster.com
Redtube.com
Beeg.com