VideoLan, the developer of the popular VLC media player, says Indian carriers have been blocking its website since February this year, potentially affecting some users in one of the open source company’s biggest markets. From the report: “Most major ISPs [internet service providers] banning the site using various methods,” VideoLan president and lead developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf said of the blocking in India in an email to TechCrunch. India accounts for 10% of all VLC users worldwide, he said. The website’s traffic has increased overall drop of 20% due to lockdown in India. […] Downloaded more than 3.5 billion times worldwide, VLC is a native media player that does not require Internet access or connection to any particular online service for the vast majority of its functions. But by blocking the website, India is pushing its citizens to “shady websites that run a hacked version of VLC. Thus, with this ban, they are putting their citizens at risk,” Kempf added.
VLC developer VideoLan says blocking the site in India puts its own citizens at risk
