I came across this report today which might interest users from India on how Airtel and Reliance Jio go about censoring websites in the country. Ofcourse, with a good VPN it is easy to get around these hurdles.
But this part of the report should worry us about the monopoly over Internet in India by two companies:
Such opaque and arbitrary censorship means that internet access of 76% of all internet users in India is conditioned by Airtel and Jio’s practices. According to TRAI’s latest Telecom Services Performance Indicator Report (January-March 2020), Jio accounts for 52.26% of all internet subscriptions in the country while Airtel accounts for 23.64%.
17m
Since the government doesn't notify citizens with a list of officially blocked websites, its unlikely everyone across the length and breadth of the country will have a similar experience using the internet especially without a VPN.
So how are Airtel and Jio blocking websites?
Airtel has configured at least 25 boxes across the country, Singh and Grover discovered, to look out for certain SNIs. When users try to access those SNIs, these middleboxes essentially block the request from proceeding along the path. With Jio, they found that HTTPS websites are blocked but haven’t found proof related to existence of middleboxes (more on that below).
I'm glad people are looking into this and sharing their researching into how these companies are doing what is asked of them by the government.
While laws allow for bans its totally unclear when and why the government can use it to its will to prevent access to any website that it deems unfit for politically motivated reasons or otherwise.
Btw, if you are looking for a solid VPN service I would recommend you to try TorGuard
If you are keen to read the actual research you can find it here and you can find their Github here