How many URLs/Websites are blocked in India? Government gives different answers

Indian state wields too much power over everything. I guess it&#x27;s remnant of a socialistic past. Consider this: CBFC is film certification board that can block a movie&#x27;s release until appropriate cuts are made subject to their whims and fancies. This makes no logical sense. Why should the Govt. interfere in whatever the movie wants to show? The max stipulation should be on what content is appropriate to which age group.<p>Websites can be blocked by people who have zero clue what they are about. Television programmes can be asked to censor everything from expletives to kissing scenes. (Try seeing Kill Bill with all violent scenes removed). Hell, Karnataka Govt. even tried to cap the price of movie tickets. [1]<p>The fact that a random litigation can persuade a judge to order to block 1000+ sites is downright scary. I don&#x27;t see anything changing near future. Politicians (and even judiciary) rarely want to do away with any power they have.<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.business-standard.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;current-affairs&#x2F;karnataka-caps-movie-ticket-prices-in-cinemas-multiplexes-at-rs-200-117050201455_1.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.business-standard.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;current-affairs&#x2F;kar...</a>

I&#x27;ve found non-https archive.org (!) to be blocked in India on a government ISP.<p>Interestingly it seems to depend on the ISP used. Same site worked fine on a mobile connection.

OONIProble is a project from TorProject group, that tests your network connection for possible censorship, MITM and network manipulation <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;f-droid.org&#x2F;packages&#x2F;org.openobservatory.ooniprobe&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;f-droid.org&#x2F;packages&#x2F;org.openobservatory.ooniprobe&#x2F;</a>

Aren&#x27;t there few enough urls that are registered that it should be easy to figure out which ones are blocked? It looks like there are only about a billion <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.internetlivestats.com&#x2F;total-number-of-websites&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.internetlivestats.com&#x2F;total-number-of-websites&#x2F;</a><p>With 1000 connections at 1 dns lookup per second that would be just 12 days. Anyone want to spin up some AWS instances in India and find out?

The rationale for blocking websites is pretty convoluted, what are they saying? I mean aside from the usual censorship justification

Blocked sites can easily be accessed using proxy or vpn. I end up doing that on a regular basis :)

I heard once that Cloudflare is widely blocked in some countries. Does somebody know any specifics?

during a major movie release, court backed banning of thousands of torrent and media sharing sites happen