VLC banned in India

Most of us would have used the VLC media player at least once in our lives or would have seen someone use it. Did you know that the VLC media player website is banned by the Government of India? That means you cannot search “VLC Media player” on Google and get there from India. I did not know this until very recently and was wondering why the government banned some innocuous open source media-player website.

The ban came around February 2022 apparently, almost 6 months ago. Yet the majority of the public, even those using the application, don’t know this. The popular notion is that a hacker group called ‘Cicada’ that is backed by the Chinese government spreads its malware using the VLC media player and the cyberattacks by this group on the Indian government prompted the government to ban the VLC media player itself.

This seems to be an incomplete ban because only the http://videolan.org website is banned by the ISPs on the orders of the Indian government. The VLC mobile app on Google play store and Apple store is still available for the public to use.

The logic for not banning the mobile app is that since these apps are hosted on Google’s and Apple’s servers instead of the servers where the desktop versions are hosted, they are termed safe. I don’t get it fully, but hey then I am just a noob in this field :)

The good thing is that users who already have the app on their desktops can continue to use it. You just won’t be able to get the app from http://videolan.org website from India, not directly at least.

Though I understand the broad idea behind banning the application in India, I think it is still not a comprehensive solution and as a long-time user of the open-source cool media player, am a tiny bit sad as well for not getting any upgrades