According to the Indian government’s decision, providers were ordered to block access to 857 websites with pornographic content, deeming them a threat to morality and decency. However, after clamoring among netizens, the order was reversed by India’s Ministry of Electronics, Vice’s Motherboard reported.
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In early October 2018, however, India’s Uttarakhand High Court reinstated that ban and even renewed the list. It removed 30 websites from the list that were deemed "adult" but not pornographic, including popular sites like CollegeHumor and 9Gag, and made it optional for the providers to unblock sites, as long as they were free of child pornography.
However, to get around the moratorium, Pornhub set up a mirror website – a copy that replicates the original website – Pornhub.net.
“We saw the news coming out of India and the commotion it was causing on social media (Twitter, Reddit, etc.) and wanted to be proactive about supplying our fans with our content. We know how often Indians peruse our site and wanted to act swiftly.” Corey Price, VP at Pornhub, told Vice in an email.
“It’s evident that the Indian government does not have a solution to a very serious and systemic problem in the country, and is using adult sites like ours as a scapegoat,” Price said in a press release. "For the government to ban sites like ours that have compliant parental controls, a non-consensual take down of the page and a strict Terms of Service is a disservice to the people of India, who have become one of the largest connoisseurs of adult content,” he added.
India isn’t the only nation to have introduced a ban on websites with pornographic content this year. Earlier in September, Nepal instituted a porn ban, citing prevention of violence against women as the justification. However, according to a spokesperson for the porn site xHamster Alex Hawkins, the traffic from Nepal dropped only for a week, and subsequently reached the same numbers.
According to a February 2018 article in The Times of India, the number of internet users in the country was set to surpass the 500 million mark in June of this year, having grown 11.34 percent in 2017 alone. Internet penetration in urban India was 64.84% as of December 2017, up from 60.6% in December 2016; however, only 20.26% of the rural population had access as of last December.
