The site received more than 60 million visits from India in November and December 2018, its highest since March. Pornhub also announced a mirror domain, pornhub.net, for Indian users after the ban was announced. This domain received nearly seven million visits from India in the following two months.
Second, Indians are also accessing the banned porn websites through easily available proxy networks or virtual private networks (VPN) that hide their identity and location, and in turn let users bypass any such ban. A sudden surge in the number of visits to some of the most popular proxy service websites makes this fact evident.
For instance, proxy site kproxy.com received 2.3 million visits from India in November, according to ComScore, another web analytics company. This was more than twice its average of 0.9 million visits in the previous three months. Another website, hide.me, received 0.7 million visits from India in November, over three times more than its average of 0.2 million visits in the previous three months.
The increased use of proxy services by porn consumers in India is also evident from data on Google Trends, a tool that quantifies the popularity of search queries over time. The popularity of search terms like “porn proxy”, “porn site proxy” and “porn vpn” in India rose seven to 10 times in the week the ban was announced.
Third, the list of the 827 websites that were banned does not cover a wide enough of such sites. Among the 500 most visited porn websites in India, according to ComScore data, only 59 websites have been banned. Among the top 10, only five have been blocked.
Aditya Gautam, author of “Pornistan: How to Survive the Porn Epidemic in India”, said he was not surprised by the findings. “It’s not possible to ban anything on the internet. It’s futile. China banned 20,000 porn websites last year but people there still consume porn in different ways,” he said. “Even if they had banned 20,000 websites, the results we got would have been similar as there are new websites coming up every single day.”
Suresh Shukla, founder of parental control application Filternet, said the list of the banned websites was too small in today’s context and estimates from data compiled by his application suggest that there are at least 1 lakh porn websites live today.
Reacting to the fact that many of the banned porn websites were accessible with https, Shukla said it should not have been technically impossible to block these websites. “It’s the will, not tools, which is important,” he said.
The ministry of electronics and information technology and the department of telecommunications did not respond to requests for comment.