Popular porn website Pornhub has found an alternative for the Reliance Jio subscribers who are not able to access their website after it was banned by the Mukesh Ambani-led company. Yes, acknowledging the difficulty faced by some of its Indian subscribers in accessing the website, the company has now produced a separate domain -- '.net' instead of '.com' -- specifically for the Indian internet users. Notably, Reliance Jio had 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.
"In response to Pornhub getting censored and blocked in India, our fans there can now fully access the site at Pornhub.net," the company said in Tweet. The issue pertains to a September 28 judgement of the Uttarakhand High Court, which directed all internet service providers (ISP) in India to abide by the Union government's order to ban hundreds of pornographic sites. The High Court decided to ban these websites after reports of a gangrape in Dehradun where the perpetrators were schoolchildren allegedly influenced by porn clips.
An unlimited access to pornographic content has to be curbed or blocked to avoid an adverse influence on the impressionable minds of children, the court had said. Back in August 2015, the Department of Telecommunications had directed (ISPs) to block more than 800 websites, including Pornhub that is legal in the US, for showing porn or face the risk of losing their licenses.
While speculation was rife that other telecom service operators could soon follow suit on banning the pornographic content on their network, most porn websites circumvent the rules by simply changing their URL or domain names. Apart from sites with pornographic content, there are a lot of other websites that are blocked in India. Sites with disturbing content, file sharing and torrent sites, etc, cannot be viewed in India, but the block is not to the impenetrable kind, like in the case of the ban on Google sites in China.
A local ISP-level block, which is commonly seen in India, can be surpassed by using VPN, Tor web browser, a different DNS server, or similar methods. However, content with child pornography, child abuse or extreme acts of violence are explicitly illegal in the country, and accessing them in any manner could lead to legal action.