Back in 2015, the Indian government sent a list of over 800 porn websites to Internet Service Providers around the country, directing them to block access to their users and citing porn’s supposedly bad influence on the populace. Said populace lost its collective shit, and the block has been largely ignored ever since. That is, until late November of 2018, when the Uttarakhand High Court reissued the directive after four boys admitted to watching porn online before gang raping a girl at their boarding school.
The boys committed a horrific crime, but Corey Price, VP of the world’s largest pornographic website Pornhub, is concerned that banning porn across the country may not do much good. “It’s evident that the Indian government does not have a solution to a very serious and systemic problem in the country, and is using adult sites like ours as a scapegoat,” he told IndianExpress.com.
Price called banning porn “a disservice to the people of India,” where, he pointed out, there are no laws against adults watching erotic entertainment privately online. Furthermore, Price said, blocking big sites like Pornhub might actually hurt the government’s attempts to curb citizens’ criminal appetites by forcing people to get their kicks on “risky porn sites that may contain illegal content.”
It’s a fair point, of course. But we’d feel remiss if we didn’t draw Mr. Price’s attention to the fact that Pornhub got to be the biggest porn site on the internet by, um, allowing users to upload illegally stolen content to its platform. In fact, Pornhub has long drawn fire from the adult industry for turning a blind eye to the copyrighted material that floods its website without its creators’ permission.
Price told IndianExpress.com that traffic to the site has already declined—India was the third-largest source of traffic to the site as of early 2018. But, while nobody wants the millions of Indian Pornhub users to find illegal content of questionable provenance, Mr. Price might consider his choice of words in the next interview. Especially the word “hypocrisy.”
