In late October of last year, an Indian high court ruled that the government must reinstate a ban on 827 porn sites across the country. Anti-pornography forces throughout the subcontinent, which had been trying to enforce bans on nearly 860 popular adult entertainment websites since 2015, rejoiced. They’d finally beaten their depraved foe!
But India is the third-biggest consumer of online porn in the world (behind the U.S. and the U.K.), according to Pornhub Analytics. And they were not about to be denied their virtual pleasures.
In the last months of 2018, after the ban was reinstated, Vijdan Mohammad Kawoosa at the Hindustan Times reported, “Overall consumption of internet porn may have increased over the past few months with traffic shifting to other sites and the use of proxy servers.”
Meanwhile, popular porn sites like Pornhub, unwilling to give up so much business so easily, “Launching mirror URLs such as pornhub.net after pornhub.com became inaccessible,” wrote Kuwar Singh at qz.com. Those mirror sites were also blocked shortly after they went online. But nothing could stop Indian porn fans from getting their fix.
So they turned to VPNs—Virtual Private Networks. In droves. In a new study released last month from Top10VPN, there was a 405% increase in Indian consumers’ use of VPNs over the twelve months following the ban’s enforcement.
VPNs are downloadable apps that enable users to browse the internet securely and mask their location. A VPN user could be accessing a porn site from anywhere in the world, and traditional internet service providers can’t tell the different. So, savvy internet users in India simply download VPNs and—voila!—all 827 banned porn sites are back in play.
“Google searches for VPN in India surged immediately after the ban was imposed, and have remained above their usual levels,” reported Singh. “Mobile downloads of virtual private network (VPN) apps in India grew 405% to 57 million in the 12 months starting October 2018.”
And even those who don’t use free VPN services are still finding workarounds to get their porn fix: “Nearly half of the visitors of the banned websites have merely shifted to other adult content sites that aren’t blocked in the country, such as RedPorn and SexVid,” wrote Singh.
Let this be a lesson to other governments who are trying to block their citizens from watching porn online: You can try to ban adult entertainment all you want. But the people will get to their jerk-off material, one way or another. Power to the people!
VPN stock image by Gem Fortune from Pexels
