“Morality” reforms have led to the Indian government ordering internet companies to ban 857 Indian porn websites.
The government’s ministry for telecommunications made the order on the back of a Supreme Court judgement last month which said access to the internet could be legitimately controlled. The change is the brainchild of lawyer Kamlesh Vaswani, reports the Hindustan Times, who has campaigned against pornography for years.
Vaswani is convinced the high prevalence of brutal rapes in India is linked to consumption of pornography. He told the Times: “My fight has been against obscenity. I feel watching porn fuels violence against women. It propels men to commit sex crimes. I saw no women come forward and speak up against pornography, so I did it”.
He rejected the notion that women also watch pornography as an an “insult” to the dignity of Indian women.
The list of websites banned by the government request was so extensive it ran to 17-sides of A4. It is reported the websites targeted went further than the expected filth mongers, but also included dating sites, as well as humourous and political sites like Collegehumour and Liveleak.
This development by Narenda Modi’s socially conservative Hindu government may be seen as part of a global movement by governments to wrestle control over what has been the libertarian internet. Breitbart London reported last week on a similar crack down in the United Kingdom, where Prime Minister David Cameron has demanded pornographic websites install identity-verification measures or face being banned altogether.
Concerned that large numbers of children are enjoying unfettered access to internet porn, the government is taking the fight to free-access porn providers to lock children out of their content completely. An Autumn consultation into controlling access to pornography will invite providers to take part – although there is little explanation over how new laws would regulate the estimated millions of porn sites hosted globally.
Changing the way we access pornography follows moves last year to regulate what content British producers and distributors of porn can give to the public. Following advice to bring regulation for online porn into line with porn bought in ‘adult’ shops on the high-street, a number of sexual acts were banned, impacting disproportionately heavily on the British ‘cottage’ porn industry.
As reported by Breitbart London last year, the acts banned included:
- Spanking
- Caning
- Aggressive whipping
- Penetration by any object “associated with violence”
- Physical or verbal abuse (regardless of consent)
- Urolagnia (known as “water sports”)
- Female ejaculation
- Strangulation
- Facesitting
- Fisting
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