The Russian Government has decided to issue a ban on 11 pornographic websites, the largest being Pornhub, as reported by NewsRu.
The Pornhub, is a porn portalgraphics video that according to Alexa is in the Top 100 most popular websites on the Internet, having built a name around itself through numerous clever marketing campaigns.
Now, the website Pornhub looks like it will gain extra free publicity since the Russian government has banned viewing on this and 10 other similar porn sites.
The decision to ban sites such as Pornhub came from a court in the small town of Krylovskogo, near the city of Krasnodar, which has decided to ban the 242 article of the Russian Federal Penal Code.
This article covers the distribution of pornographic material and makes reference to illegal child pornography. But to be fair, the court's decision was somewhat unclear, referring to the entire article of the law, without further explanation.
A similar controversial decision to ban a Wikipedia page for cannabis has also ruled in a small town in southern Russia, and Russia seems to have a tendency to let controversial decisions about censorship be taken by regional small courts and as far as possible from Moscow so that dissolve any involvement of the Kremlin.
There is also the feeling that 11 only adult websites that are banned seem a bit like a symbolic decision, since everyone who has done some relevant surfing on the web knows there are many more 11 pornographic websites all over the web.
This raises the question of the interpretation of political freedoms in Russia when it comes to the Internet, since the country has the prehistory of excessive bans to the Reddit, Wikipedia, Wayback Machine websites, which it then suspended a few days later.
For connoisseurs, this decision is once again the hand of Roskomnadzor (Federal Office for Telecoms, Information Technologies and Media), controlled by the Russian government, which seems to impose its policy strict censorship of Putin.
A similar ban on pornographic websites material it was previously studied by the UK government, but the EU Parliament immediately put an end to such silly ideas.
The same thing happened to India in mid-August, when the ban on porn websites lasted only one day after public outcry forced the country's government to take it back.