In late October of 2018, a court in India ordered the government there to ban online access to porn sites—a ban that would fall to India’s giant internet provider companies to carry out, as AVN.com reported. In all, according to reports out of India at the time, 827 sites had been blocked by the companies, including Reliance Jio, Airtel and others.
But now, about two months later, Indian porn fans are finding ways around the porn ban, using some rather simple tricks and techniques that negate the blocking software used by the giant Indian ISPs, according to the news site India Today.
While the list of banned sites has not been made public, India Today reported that based on social media posts, Pornhub and Xvideos appear to be prominent among the blocked sites. But Pornhub itself has found a way to let its users in India reach its content—simply by setting up a “Pornhub.net” URL, because the only blocked address is the site’s “.com” URL.
Online porn has skyrocketed in popularity just in the last two years, as AVN.com has reported, due mainly to the boom in low-cost data sparked by Reliance Jio, which in 2016 began offering free and “dirt cheap” data services.
Pornhub, Xvideos and the other currently “banned” sites are legal to view in India. The ban applies to internet providers who offer access to the internet.
According to India Today, accessing the legal, but blocked, sites in India is as simple as using a Virtual Private Network such as VPN included at no cost on the free web browser Opera. Using the VPN circumvents the DNS servers—that is, the servers that look up internet addresses—used by Jio and the other Indian ISPs.
Any porn site that uses the secure “https” protocol can also be accessed in India simply by starting the URL with “https” rather than “http” or “www,” which creates a secure, encrypted connection that will not be blocked by the Indian ISP servers.
Photo By Nairspecht / Wikimedia Commons
