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Blocking of Proton Mail in India

Open qurbat opened this issue 5 months ago • 3 comments
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Last month, the Karnataka High Court passed a judgement ordering the Indian Government to block access to Proton Mail.

BENGALURU: The Karnataka High Court on Tuesday directed the Union Government to block the Switzerland-based ProtonMail in India and to take steps for immediate blocking of the offending Uniform Resource Locator (URLs) of Protonmail till action is taken to block the service. Justice M Nagaprasanna pronounced the operative portion of the order, allowing a petition by M Moser Design Associates India, Bengaluru. The full order is yet to be released.

The petitioner moved the high court seeking directions to the Centre to act against Proton AG, pointing out that Proton’s servers are located outside India, and it is claiming that it is not bound by Indian laws.

While contending that Proton’s email service allows users to select India as their location, which gives a false impression that the company is operating from within the country, the petitioner stated that it filed a police complaint in November 2024. It alleged that some unknown persons are misusing Proton Mail to target the company’s female employees by sending obscene, abusive and derogatory emails containing AI-generated deep-fake images and explicit content. But not much progress has been made on the police complaint.

Source: https://www.newindianexpress.com/states/karnataka/2025/Apr/30/ban-protonmail-block-offending-urls-immediately-karnataka-hc-to-centre

To date, however, the block doesn't seem to have been implemented across very many ISPs in India. I used my access to a network of DNS resolvers across 100 ASes and found that at the DNS level, only a single, relatively small regional ISP in the state of Tamil Nadu ("Readylink") is currently blocking the service, at both the proton.me and protonmail.com domains.

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For context, with the exception of Vodafone Idea (Vi), the top 5 ISPs in India (serving a customer base of roughly 880 million users) all use DNS poisoning or injection as a censorship technique, along with other techniques such as HTTP blocking or SNI-based filtering.

qurbat avatar May 29 '25 12:05 qurbat