'VideoLAN is threatening to sue India's government, saying it has received no explanation for why the VLC website has been blocked by Indian ISPs for the past six months.

"In March 2022, to our shock and dismay, the URL 'https://www.videolan.org/' appeared to have been blocked for viewing in India without any prior notice to me or any other person in the organization," VideoLAN president and lead VLC developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf wrote in a September 30 letter to India's Department of Telecommunications. "Despite reportage and uproar on social media, no reasons for blocking the URL were provided to us, or to the Indian public."

The letter said attempts to reach the URL in India resulted in the message, "Your requested URL has been blocked as per the directions received from the Department of Telecommunications, Government of India."

VideoLAN is a French nonprofit organization that developed the free, open source VLC Media Player. In an email, Kempf told Ars that "VideoLAN is an organization that does not do politics (we only take position on anti-DRM and pro-open source subjects). So this topic is a bit of a shock to us."

VideoLAN's letter told Indian government officials that the blocking "is particularly shocking to us, since the Government of India itself endorses the use of VLC as a part of its Digital India initiative, where it has expressed its intention to use open-source softwares for government applications. In fact, the Government of India also appears to use VLC Media Player's icon and logo on its website promoting open source softwares."

The letter to India's government said, "VLC is currently being used by 80 million Indians, and has consistently seen an average of 25 million downloads per year in India since its release. For millions of Indians VLC is the primary choice for running all kinds of media formats for free."'

-- source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/videolan-gets-no-answers-on-why-...

Cheers, Peter