Reliance Jio And Other Indian Internet Service Providers Block SoundCloud And Telegram

According to a recent report on the Internet, Internet Service providers and telecommunication companies in India have blocked several websites to ban porn. This move was not surprising at all when it was done in 2015, but the problem here is that even websites excluded from the porn ban got blocked too. Worse, some of the porn-irrelevant blocked websites are quite popular and useful to people.

Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), an organization based in New Delhi, has released a list of complaints against telecom operators for banning services and websites that do not display porn.

As in the list and Quartz India’s separate report, Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio are blocking Virtual Private Network (VPN) as well as proxy websites, Telegram, and SoundCloud. IFF’s list consists of over 130 complaints crowdsourced after the organization looked at similar reports in January.

Over a fortnight, there were more than 130 complaints, 85 of those were from users of Reliance Jio, and the rest were from people using Airtel. The Internet service providers listed by IFF include Hathway, Vodafone India, BSNL, and ACT Fibernet. According to IFF’s report, complaints come from various areas, consisting of both major metropolitan cities and smaller towns like Udupi, Mindapur, and Siliguri, which means the block could be nationwide.

Besides, Quartz India’s report illustrated that by banning websites that are not related to the actual ruling or matter, these companies have violated internet net neutrality. Mumbai appears to suffer from the blocking too as BGR India said they could not access SoundCloud via Reliance Jio connection. They reported seeing a message saying:

As further stated in the report, DoT Jio’s blocking of Telegram is not available with the central public information officer. More details are hoped to come out from Airtel and Reliances Jio about the matter.