Why banning porn sites in India isn’t working – Technology News, Firstpost

Mehul Ruben Das05 Oct 2022 16:42:01 IST

No matter what anyone says, people in India love porn. Despite the fact that the Indian government has repeatedly tried to ban porn in one way or another in the country, consumers of pornographic materials and films find something or the other.

Although porn per se is not completely banned in India, from time to time the Indian government compiles lists of porn site URLs that ISPs can block. However, even this does not stop avid users of infamy from visiting these supposedly banned sites.

We delve deep into Indian porn consumption habitsand why, it is almost impossible for the Indian government to completely ban porn.

Crunching the numbers: Porn consumption in India
Unsurprisingly, the second most populous country in the world is also one of the leading consumers of porn. According to some surveys, India ranks third in the world in terms of porn consumption, while others rank us second. As recently as 2019, about 89 percent of mobile phone users have viewed some form of pornography on their phones, with the vast majority watching videos. A 20 percent jump in the consumption of pornographic content was reported in India during the lockdown.

And for some reason, if anyone thinks that only men use the Internet, they are wrong. About 30 percent of Indian porn consumers are women, according to PornHub’s internal data.

Internet problem
Although most Indians consume porn using their smartphones, the number of people who actually store porn on their phones is very low. Most of the visual porn consumed in India is consumed online, thanks to the availability of very cheap data plans.

While a government ban on certain URLs can be harmful, it cannot actually stop people from accessing those websites. Moreover, much of the porn consumed in India is the stuff that is shared using WhatsApp and Telegram.

Why does banning porn sites not work?
Let’s take China as an example to better understand why banning porn, especially in the internet age, just doesn’t work. Pornography has been banned in China since 1949. In 2002, the Chinese government began a crackdown on Internet pornography. China is also known for its extremely censored version of the Internet, so people often assume that China has its own, separate Internet.

However, China has quite a large number of porn consumers. There are various other stories around the world – Afghanistan, most of the Middle East, our neighbors to the east, and also to the west – much of Asia has tried to ban internet porn at some point.

One might think that VPNs and proxies might be the only reason why it is impossible to ban a pornographic website. While this may be true for some, there are various other reasons why banning porn sites doesn’t really work.

First of all, any government bans a website by sending URLs or a list of URLs to an ISP. Most websites can create a mirror site with a slightly different URL or move their content to a similar domain.

The filtering system can also be defeated if a website chooses to encrypt traffic using HTTPS instead of HTTP, because then ISPs cannot see what the user is accessing. This becomes much easier if the previous version of the website that the URL was sent to didn’t have the HTTPS bit in the URL, but only HTTP.

The biggest challenge, however, is the culmination of the previous two. The sheer number of websites and their name permutations is impossible to keep track of. It would be virtually impossible for any government to track all pornographic websites or web addresses that host pornographic content.

But yes, this is the easiest and simplest way to bypass any ban on porn consumers in India through VPN and proxy servers. There is also the fact that some popular browsers come with built-in VPNs and proxy servers.

Content blocking and filtering can be made more robust if we use keyword-based filtering or deep packet inspection of internet traffic. This is what countries like China and Saudi Arabia have tried, but it’s also much more expensive and difficult to maintain, not to mention that if someone really tries to bypass the system, they still can.

In short, several countries have made pornography illegal. However, none of them have been able to completely ban or stop the consumption of pornography within their sovereign borders.

While VPNs and proxies make it nearly impossible for governments to ban porn, that’s not the only reason. | Image credit: Unsplash

What does Indian law say?
Pornography as a topic in India is quite interesting. Sale and distribution of pornographic material is illegal in India under Section 292. Similarly, child pornography is illegal and strictly prohibited across the country under Section 67B of the Information Technology Act, 2000. Production, publication and distribution of pornography is illegal in India. according to articles 292, 293.

However, in a 2015 case, the Supreme Court of India verbally stated that viewing porn in a private room could fall within the constitutional right to personal liberty. The Supreme Court eventually banned pornographic websites, and the government tried to ban more than 850 popular websites. However, the government was forced to lift the ban on a number of websites. In 2018, the Uttarakhand High Court reinstated the Supreme Court’s ban after a group of 4 boys accused of rape in state capital Dehradun said that they were motivated to commit the crime after watching a pornographic film.

It is certainly illegal to access banned websites using proxies and virtual private networks that have been banned, but it is unlikely that anyone will ever be prosecuted for such a crime unless the person is also accused of serious crimes.