India ISP That Blocked Porn Sites Loses Traffic Due To Ban

The giant telecom company Reliance Jio turned India’s online access market on its head two years ago when it debuted by offering low-cost data plans and smartphones that were equally cheap or even free. And one result of Jio’s sudden rise was another sudden rise—in porn viewing by Indian internet users. As AVN.com has reported, Google search data shows a steep spike in porn consumption there since 2016, when Reliance Jio entered the internet market.  But last October, when an Indian court ordered the government to block hundreds of porn sites, Reliance Jio reportedly led the way, imposing blocks on 827 porn sites. But Jio went a step further, also taking steps to block its more than 200 million subscribers from using VPN services, and other types of proxy networks, that would allow users to get around the porn blockages by disguising their internet IP addresses as originating in other countries.  But there are now signs that Reliance Jio may be suffering blowback from its enthusiastic support of the porn ban, seeing an overall drop in traffic by its users for the final quarter of 2018, with the average Jio customer dropping data use from an average of 11 gigabytes per month to 10.8 gigs, according to a report by The Hindu newspaper. Asked whether the drop in data use by its customers was a result of the ban on porn sites, Jio official Anshuman Thakur replied, “Yes, you could say that.” Jio’s new subscriber signups also dropped in the last three months of 2018, to 27.8 million new subscribers during that period, when the porn ban took effect, from 37 million in the previous quarter. At the same time, new statistics indicate that India’s porn ban has proven largely ineffective, with overall consumption of online porn across all internet providers actually showing an increase over the last quarter of 2018, according to a report by The Hindustan Times.  The increase, the report said, is partly due to India’s porn fans accessing sites not covered by the blockages. In a statistical survey of 441 sites that have not been blocked, traffic more than doubled to those sites in the final three months of last year, compared to the previous quarter. The analysis also discovered that of the 827 supposedly banned porn sites, 345 remained accessible to porn consumers simply by using an internet security protocol activated by typing “https” at the start of an online address, rather than simply “http.” The data analysis showed that traffic to Pornhub, which reported receiving one-third of its 2018 traffic from India, showed an increase after the porn ban. Photo By Nairspecht/Wikimedia Commons