Giant Wireless Company Secretly Aiding India Porn Ban: Reports

Following a court decision in India requiring that the country ban access to online porn, reports began to emerge in October that internet access providers had begun blocking as many as 827 adult sites, as AVN.com reported. While no official announcements of specific bans were, or have been, issued, online reports focused on the fast-rising wireless access giant Reliance Jio, which users alleged had shut off access to the sites. But now according to new online reports by users, the Indian telecom firm may be going a step further, thwarting attempts by users in its 250-million strong subscriber base to find workarounds to the ban using Virtual Private Network (VPN) software, according to a report by Quartz India.  Jio appears to have blocked access to “proxy sites” where the VPN software can be downloaded, according to the report. VPN software allows internet users to rout their connections through “proxy” servers, making it appear as if they are surfing the web from a different location, even another country.  By appearing to log in from outside of India, porn fans there could access sites that would otherwise be blocked off from access within the country. As AVN.com reported last week, VPN and other forms of proxy software had already become widely used in India to get around the porn ban.  But Reliance Jio now appears to be taking steps to stop users from using proxy servers for that purpose. If true, the internet giant could be in violation of India’s net neutrality regulations, which the country’s government adopted last August.  Net neutrality, as AVN.com has extensively covered, prohibits internet access providers from slowing or blocking traffic to some arbitrarily selected sites, while favoring others. The demand for online porn has jumped sharply in India—where viewing porn sites is legal, though producing porn is not—since 2016. That was the year that Reliance Jio entered the market and swiftly rose to dominate it by offering cheap and even free wireless online access, as well as phones that themselves were offered for free, or at steep discounts. The company was founded by the richest person in India, and 19th-richest individual in the world, Mukesh Ambani, who has a reported net worth of $45 billion. "At least seven proxy sites were not accessible when Quartz tried to view them from a Jio connection," the site reported. "Some of the blocked sites on Jio are Hide.me, VPNbook, Hidester, Kproxy, Proxysite, Proxy.toolur, and Megaproxy. These were not blocked on other networks Quartz tested, including Vodafone, Airtel, Spectranet, and ACT." Why Reliance Jio has taken the lead in secretly aiding the porn ban by blocking proxy sites—in apparent violation of net neutrality rules—remains unclear. Photo By Jim Carter/Wikimedia Commons