Roskomnadzor strikes again, this time it targets adult sites

Sep 9, 2015 01:15 GMT  ·  By

Russia's government has decided to go full-crazy and issue a ban on 11 pornographic websites, of which the biggest is PornHub, as NewsRu is reporting.

PornHub, a pornographic video portal that's ranked by Alexa in the Top 100 most popular sites on the Internet, has made a name for itself through numerous clever marketing campaigns.

Now, the website is getting a lot of free publicity, after the Russian government has announced a state-wide ban on it and 10 other similar pornographic websites.

Another controversial decision from another small town judicial court

The decision to ban the sites came after a court in the small town of Krylovskogo, near the city of Krasnodar, ruled to ban the sites based on article 242 of the Russian Federation's Criminal Code.

The article in question covers the distribution of pornographic materials, and also mentions illegal child pornography.

To be fair, the court ruling was kind of vague, pointing the finger at an entire article of the law, with no further explanations.

A similar controversial decision to ban a Wikipedia page on cannabis has also been ruled in a small town in southern Russia, and this seems to be a trend of leaving controversial censorship-tied decisions to small-time judges, as far away from Moscow as possible, all to dispel any Kremlin involvement.

Another page in Russia's campaign of threats and intimidation when it comes to Internet sites

Since only 11 adult websites were banned, this looks a lot like a symbolic ruling, since anyone that has ever surfed the Web knows there are more than 11 pornographic sites online.

This seems to be another strange way of interpreting civil liberties when it comes to the Internet in Russia, a country which has previously mysteriously come to the conclusion that it needs to ban Reddit, Wikipedia, or the Wayback Machine, and then suddenly recanting on its decisions a few days later.

For connoisseurs, this is yet again the hand of Roskomnadzor (Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom, Information Technologies and Mass Communications), Russia's government-controlled Internet watchdog, which seems to enforce Putin's strict censorship policies.

Unfortunately, we fail to see any connection between adult movies and Putin's regular censorship policies, so maybe Roskomnadzor can enlighten us with a more detailed press release compared to this one.

A similar ban on Internet pornographic sites was previously pondered by the UK government, but the EU Parliament soon put a stop to such foolish notions.

The same thing happened in India in the middle of August, when a ban on pornographic websites only lasted a day before public outcry forced the country's government to turn on its heels.