DuckDuckGo Unbanned in India after a Brief Ban on July 1st. The ban came out of nowhere after users reported issues with accessing the search engine. The search engine is now back for most of the Indian users after contacting the Indian ISP’s.
DuckDuckGo Unbanned in India
DuckDuckGo is an internet search engine that focuses on protecting the privacy of searchers and avoiding the filter bubble of personalized search results. DuckDuckGo sets itself apart from other search engines by not profiling its users and displaying the same search results for a given search term to all users.
The privacy-focused DuckDuckGo browser seemed to have been briefly banned by Indian ISPs after India’s ban of 59 Applications from China. The service was blocked by the DNS servers that Indian ISPs uses but was accessible by third-party DNS servers like Google DNS and Cloudflare’s DNS.
The ban looked like an accidental fallout from the blocking of the Chinese Applications. DuckDuckGo said that it was bewildered after the ban and contacted the Indian Government for an explanation and also sent letters to the ISPs.
In the meantime it appears switching to a third-party DNS provider fixes the issue, e.g. the more private 1.1.1.1.
Here’s how to set it up on Android: https://t.co/CeNuiZiHKw
— DuckDuckGo (@DuckDuckGo) July 1, 2020
The Ban on Chinese Applications was done after the increase in border skirmishes with China. Famous applications like TikTok, UC Browser was banned by India’s Telecom Department.
While some ISPs are already removing their blocks at the moment, the situation is still somewhat uncertain. Many people seem to have been impacted by the ban, though others say DuckDuckGo remained reachable to them. Some providers added a warning that the website has been blocked by the Indian Telecommunications Department, while others merely send out failed DNS lookup errors.
