Reliance Jio had recently banned hundreds of pornographic websites from its network, including the ones like Pornhub and Xvideos after the Department of Telecom issued a directive asking the internet service providers to block around 800 porn websites.
This move comes after the Uttarakhand High Court had in September asked the centre to cancel the licenses of websites that offer obscene content. A division bench of the HC had cited an earlier notification and asked the central government to issue strict orders to internet service license holders to ‘punctually’ obey the orders to block transmission of pornographic and obscene content.
However, the difficulty in the implementation of an ill-thought-out plan resulted in PornHub, a popular adult content website circumventing the government order to service providers with ease.
PornHub simply changed its domain extension — to ‘.net’ instead of ‘.com’ — specifically for the Indian internet users.
The adult content website tweeted their changed domain extension and said that in response to PornHub getting censored and blocked in India, their fans can fully access their website on the new extension.
In response to Pornhub getting censored and blocked in India, our fans there can now fully access the site at https://t.co/xWrwXOE5sX
— Pornhub ARIA (@Pornhub) October 26, 2018
The futility of this exercise of forwarding a list of to-be-banned adult content websites to service providers is evident from the fact that all the adult content website had to do was to change its domain extension in order to circumvent the government direct and the High Court order.
One of the main reasons why Indian courts and perhaps even the government is unable to crack down on adult content is because inherently, such institutions don’t understand the nature of the internet and that controlling anything on the web, even if it seems unreasonable to many, is a near impossibility.
