People in India find it difficult to download the iconic VLC Media Player, but no official reason has been released so far.
VideoLAN, the Paris-based company behind the open source video player, has confirmed that its official website has been blocked since February 13. This was discovered when the site experienced an 80% drop in traffic in the South Asian market. President and Lead Developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf told TechCrunch (opens in a new tab).
"The weirdest thing is that some ISPs block it and others don't. So why is this the case? Some ISPs don't listen to the government?" Kempf wrote on the Hacker News forum (opens in a new tab).
Users who have already downloaded the media player can continue to use it without any problem as it does not need to be connected to any of their servers to work. And while VLC is still available to download from the Apple Store, Google Play, and mirror sites, people may need an Indian VPN to be able to download it from their official site.
VideoLAN is now asking for help on social media, hoping to get answers to the question.
If you are in India, please help us. https://t.co/rOpIjlx0q912August 2022, XNUMX
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As mentioned above, the Indian government has so far not given an official reason for its decision.
Digital rights group Internet Freedom Foundation confirmed in a tweet (opens in new tab) that India's Ministry of Electronics and Computing responded to its inquiry on July 14, saying "no information is available."
Meanwhile, some reports speculate that the ban could be due to allegedly Chinese government-backed hacker group Cicada using a fake version of VLC Media Player, among other apps, to launch malware attacks.
"VideoLAN is pretty apolitical (we only fight against DRM and open source) and VLC is a pure tool that can play anything," Kempf said.
He also added that if this was the real motivation behind the ban, it would do more harm than good by pushing users to download his service through less secure sites.
Experts... Blocking the main website will only lead users to stranger websites and therefore suspicious versions of VLC. These experts are incompetent... https://t.co/QNVQwh8HF216August 2022, XNUMX
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VideoLAN said that 10% of all VLC users globally are based in India.
More and more netizens are calling the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Computing on social media to lift the ban.
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