Even though the Indian government banned 827 porn websites in October, it has still not stopped anyone from consuming pornography. In fact, research shows that porn consumption in India (which is the third highest consumer of pornography in the world) has only increased.
A study conducted by SimpleWeb has revealed that the number of visits to porn sites in the months of November and December in 2018 has been significantly higher compared to the numbers between January and October.
The visits to these banned sites had come down by 50 per cent to 0.8 billion visits after October but the study credits the use of proxy networks for the drastic increase in the consumption of pornography from various websites. It said that these other websites saw 0.6 million visits between January and October. However, in November and December, there were at least 2 billion visits.
So this brings us to the question, has the porn ban really stopped Indians from consuming the content?
The answer is no because there are so many other websites which haven't been banned and since pornography hasn't been criminalized in the country, people will still be able to access the content through different sites if not from those which have been banned.
Why did India ban porn sites in 2018?
India had already tried to ban porn websites in 2015 but was unsuccessful. However, in 2018, the Uttarakhand High Court had asked the Supreme Court of India to bring back the order. This move was made after a rape accused said that he was prompted to commit the crime after watching pornography.
Hence, on October 27, 2018, the Indian government directed the internet service providers to ban a total of 827 websites.
Has the porn ban worked?
The ban hasn't really worked because a majority of the top websites haven't been banned. Out of the top 500 most visited sites, only 59 were prohibited.
Pornhub had launched a mirror site called pornhub.net, after the announcement of the ban.
How were the regulations bypassed?
Many also found loopholes while typing the URL. For example, some users discovered that if they type 'https' instead of the usual 'http', they will be able to access the websites.
The top three porn websites - Xnxx, Xvideos and Pornhub can be accessed through this method. Hindustan Times reported that out of the 827 sites 'banned', at least 345 are still accessible by typing https instead of http.
However, some of the most common ways to bypass the regulations are to use proxy networks or Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).
According to the report, Google Trends revealed that searches on how to access pornography through proxy websites increased during November and December. Some of the common keywords were "porn site proxy", "porn proxy" and "porn vpn".
The traffic through proxy networks increased substantially in the two months following the ban, a study by Comscore, a web analytics company revealed. It said that proxy websites such as kproxy.com, hide.me and other similar sites had over 2.3 million visits in November alone.
Many experts on the subject said that it is not possible to ban anything on the internet since it will always be possible to access content through different methods.
Aditya Gautam, author of "Pornistan: How to Survive the Porn Epidemic in India", was quoted as saying by HT, "It's not possible to ban anything on the internet. It's futile. China banned 20,000 porn websites last year but people there still consume porn in different ways. Even if they had banned 20,000 websites, the results we got would have been similar as there are new websites coming up every single day."
