Internet history. After an all-too-brief interval of online purity and
virtue, the pornographic video-sharing website Pornhub suddenly became
accessible again to Web users in Russia, where it was banned by law
enforcement seven months ago.
Without any formal word
from government censors, Internet users around the country reported on
Thursday that they could once again reach Pornhub from Russian-based Web
servers, despite
a court ruling that banned the site nationwide.
Pornhub
ended up on Russia’s Internet blacklist last September, after a court
in the provincial Russian city of Voronezh ruled that it “illegally
distributes pornographic material.”Judge Vladimir Panasenko later told the news site Meduza that he “scarcely remembered” the case, which took place in May 2016.
According
to Alexa Internet, Inc., which provides commercial web traffic data,
Pornhub.com was the 40th most popular website in Russia in 2015,
outranking major news media outlets like Ekho Moskvy, Vesti.ru, and
Gazeta.ru.
