Recently, the Indian Government blocked 857 adult websites that have been apparently deemed ‘harmful’ and ‘negative’ to the Indian society.
And now India’s Telecom Ministry has come up with yet another out-of-the-box logic.
The ministry has explained that there is nothing to worry about since the websites are not locked and “the court noted that free and open access to these websites should be controlled, but these sites will continue to be available through the mechanism of a VPN.”
 
It is strange that the telecom ministry has given out such a statement because:
a)  Why should a free nation like ours have to deal with a ban on porn, something that should not  be illegal if watched within the confines of our homes?
b)Â Is the ministry suggesting that we are allowed to defy a ban IMPOSED by them and access porn sites through VPNs?
For those of you who don’t know, a Virtual Private Network (VPN) allows users to send and receive data across shared or public networks between network-enabled devices, thus acting as a virtual tunnel.
If you didn’t know what VPN stands for, Â there is quite a high possibility you wouldn’t know how to use VPNs to access these sites.
Now, say we can access contents which are banned with the help of VPNs or with the help of software that can mask your IP address. The fact that VPNs are excellent in monitoring and filtering traffic through them and use surveillance infrastructure that may not be available with the Telecom Ministry. So even if they try to, they cannot monitor content accessed through VPNs.
But…
This also means that access of these blocked sites or for that matter any site through a VPN will be a privilege that only a few (who can pay for the VPNs) will be able to have. Which means that if you can’t pay for VPNs, you can’t access select content/websites. Sucks, right?
But, is this a solution? Isn’t this making the government look silly?