Last October following a ruling handed down by an Indian court, the country’s biggest internet service providers began blocking a reported 827 online porn sites, as AVN.com reported. But the giant telecom companies, led by Reliance Jio, have increased their blockages to sites apparently unrelated to porn, including the audio streaming site Soundcloud, for reasons that remain unclear.
As with the blocks placed on porn sites, Jio and other large ISPs such as Airtel have made no public announcements about the blockages. But the Internet Freedom Foundation, an online civil liberties advocacy group, has reported receiving more than 130 complaints in the past two weeks saying that Soundcloud and the web portal for the private messaging app Telegram have been blocked by Jio and Airtel.
In response to requests for information about the blocking program by the IFF, the Indian government has maintained a wall of silence, answering only that the information is “not available.” The Department of Telecommunications, which governs the internet in India, cited “secrecy provisions under the Blocking Rules” to avoid revealing why Soundcloud and Telegram were blocked—or even that they were blocked at all—according to the IFF.
The IFF said that the secrecy surrounding the blockages went “against the spirit” of the court ruling that set off the porn ban in the first place. “So it seems to be saying it does not know why Reliance Jio is blocking Telegram. Is first secrecy and then a lack of info why the block happening good for a digital democracy?” the IFF said on its Twitter account.
The sudden emergence of low-cost service provider Jio in 2016 appears to be responsible for an equally sudden spike in porn viewing by Indian internet users, as AVN.com reported in December. But Jio has also led the way in censoring that porn, and now it appears other, non-porn sites as well, creating the impression of a censorship slippery slope that starts with a ban on porn sites and quickly expands to cover other sources of information and content as well.
After Jio started blocking porn sites last last year, the telecom giant saw a drop in traffic, with users who averaged 11 gigabytes of data use cutting back to 10 gigs in the final quarter of 2018.
Jio has also reportedly blocked its users from accessing virtual private networks (VPNs) that would allow them to get around the porn ban by appearing to access the blocked sites from countries outside of India, as AVN.com reported.
Photo By Nairspecht/Wikimedia Commons
