India took a very shocking decision this weekend, as it forced internet providers to ban as many as 857 porn sites without any warning and explanation for this drastic move.
What led to this odd ruling is a very intricate matter, considering that the Indian Supreme Court has decided to reject the proposal to ban pornographic websites only a few weeks back. Furthermore, Chief Justice H.L. Dattu specifically pointed out that watching porn is absolutely legal for adults, as long as they do so in the privacy of their own homes.
His views were obviously not shared by Kamlesh Vaswani, the man who was behind the request to ban the 857 porn websites, that Chief Justice Dattu rejected. He claims that the reason behind his involvement in this matter is that he felt outraged by a horrible crime that was committed in New Delhi in 2012, when a young woman was brutally raped by 12 men on a bus.
It is obvious that Mr. Vaswani believed that porn was what led those 12 men to do the horrible things that they did, as his strong worded ban request clearly points out that pornography has extremely grave consequences on people and moreover on society.
“It is worse than Hitler, worse than AIDS, cancer or any other epidemic. It is more catastrophic than nuclear holocaust, and it must be stopped.” Mr. Vaswani wrote.
It is not yet clear what led the government to take these drastic measures so soon after the Supreme Court ruled against the measure. The Department of Telecommunications sent the list of 857 websites to internet carriers and the result was that people were led to blank pages when they tried to access anyone of the sites on the list.
Whether or not it was an abusive measure it remains to be decided by the proper authorities, but what it clearly was a an extremely ineffective measure. To Mr. Vaswani’s disappointment, pornography cannot be eliminated from the Word Wide Web by banning 857 websites. Despite the fact that it is quite easy for these particular 857 websites to change their URLs and exit the ban, it is also extremely easy for Indian porn fans to access international servers.
When there’s a will, there’s a way, and there definitely is a will for watching porn among Indians, according to extensive data from numerous porn websites. Indians are in the top positions on any major porn site’s rankings. Overall, India is the fourth largest market for pornographic content in the world, which means that there’s a pretty big chance that among these disappointed people, there are at least a few IT buffs who can free the porn from under the government’s ban.
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