CYBERSPACE — Pornhub and Redtube have reentered the Indian market as “Pornhub.org” and “Redtube.net," after being banned by the country’s restrictive censorship laws.
In 2015, India’s Department of Telecommunications had banned 857 adult websites, including Pornhub.com and Redtube.com, as “immoral and indecent” through a letter sent to all internet service providers.
The letter ordered the ISPs to effect the “disablement of porn websites (under the provisions of Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act, 2000), ‘as the content posted on these websites relate to morality, decency as given in Article 19(2) of the Constitution.’”
The population of India is estimated at 1.339 billion people, almost as many people as there are in China (1.386 billion) and over 1 billion more people than live in the U.S. (325.7 million).
Although users had gotten around the ban by using virtual private networks (VPNs) or proxies, Pornhub and Redtube can now be accessed via their “non-profit” (.org) and “network” (.net) reincarnations.
The Department of Telecommunications letter had explicitly banned the commercial (.com) versions of those sites.
A news report today (re-published by Mashable) quotes a local “cyber law expert,” Pavan Duggal, who seems to conflate “the entire issue of pornography and child pornography,” before demanding “strict cyber-security laws.”
In fact, the report, completely out of context, quotes a 2015 column in the India Times by Duggal where India’s top cyber law analyst clearly says “I have been advocating for [a long time] that India needs to adopt a pragmatic approach and needs to focus on achievable targets like child pornography and not pornography as a whole.”
According to Duggal, debates about the age of consent (which bear on the legal definition of what is “child pornography”) in India, hinge on the age when a girl is considered to have “attain[ed] puberty.”
The Department of Telecommunications’ letter censoring hundreds of sites, for Duggal, “amounts to abdication by the government of its mandatory responsibilities and is contrary to the provisions of Indian Cyberlaw.” ISPs in India, he concludes, “do not have the wherewithal to determine what is child pornography" and what is adult content.