Indian Government Blocks, Unblocks Access To Vimeo, Other Sites

For the last few days, Internet users in India couldn’t watch videos on Vimeo due to a government order blocking access to the site. Now, the Indian Ministry of Communications & Information Technology (IMCIT) has lifted the ban on Vimeo, as well as on other sites like Dailymotion, GitHub, and Weebly.

On December 17, 2014, India’s Department of Telecom ordered internet service providers to ban 32 websites reportedly hosting anti-India content from terrorist group ISIS. The websites included the four previously mentioned, as well as several popular coding and developer-related sites such as Pastebin, Codepad, and SnippetSource. Even indexing site archive.org was blocked by the government order.

But a few days later, on December 31, IMCIT released a press statement which said it had contacted GitHub, Vimeo, Weebly, and Dailymotion and was working to ensure they could be unblocked. The ministry noted the sites “have undertaken not to allow pasting of such propaganda information on their website and also work with the Govt. to remove such material as per the compliance with the laws of land.”

As of January 2, 2015, those four previously-blocked sites are now accessible to India’s citizens. A Vimeo spokesperson said, “We’re grateful for this decision and we look forward to having access to Vimeo restored in India soon.”

The ban on the 28 other websites has not been lifted as of this writing.