The government’s effort to prevent citizens from watching pornography by directing internet service providers to block users’ access to 827 websites in October last year hasn’t quite worked, according to website analytics data.
On the contrary, 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.
Fifty-nine of the banned websites, data of which was shared by SimilarWeb, a web analytics company, received an average of 1.7 billion monthly visits between January and October 2018.
In November and December, the figure dropped to 0.8 billion visits per month.
While it marked a 50% decline in user visits, indicating that the ban may be working, this has been more than compensated for by visits to at least 441 other websites that are not banned, the data shows. These websites together received an average of 0.6 billion visits per month between January and October, and an average of two billion in November and December.
In effect, the banned and non-banned websites that were analysed together received 2.8 billion visits in both November and December, which is more than their monthly average of 2.3 billion visits between January and October.
SimilarWeb said it could not share the data for the other banned websites because the data was not reliable due to the relatively low popularity of those websites. But the trend is clear: India’s overall consumption of pornographic content on the internet has not diminished.
The ban was ordered in October 2018 following a direction by the Uttarakhand high court, which asked the government to restore its 2015 order banning websites with pornographic content on the grounds that watching porn encourages sexual assault.
Several factors explain why the ban is not working the way it was supposed to.
First, at least 42% of the websites in the banned list (345 of the total 827) are still accessible on the internet, the analysis found. Indians are able to access these websites if they write ‘https’ (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) instead of ‘http’ in the web address.
These accessible websites include the top three porn websites in India — Xnxx, Xvideos and Pornhub. In December, Pornhub announced that a third of its traffic in 2018 came from India. In fact, visits to its website increased after the ban, according to SimilarWeb data.