VLC media player developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf
India
In May 2022, it was reported by MediaNama that VLC was banned in India and its website was inaccessible from India under the provisions of the Information Technology Act, 2000. Neither the developers, nor the Indian government offered any explanation to the ban, according to India Today. The official VideoLAN Twitter account stated in August that the website was blocked in India from 13 February 2022. A report by Hindustan Times indicated that the ban could be due to links with China. India had in 2020 banned over 200 Chinese apps following the 2020–2022 China–India skirmishes. Another Hindustan Times report from April quoting Symantec said that Chinese hackers were depending on VLC to launch malware they had previously installed on Windows machines. The technique they used is called DLL side-loading, in which an external library that a legitimate program loads at runtime is substituted with a modified version containing the malware. VideoLan president and lead developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf said, the block was most likely a result of a misunderstanding of the Chinese security issue, although the Indian Government did not provide for a reason as to why it was blocked. In October 2022, VLC, with assistance from the Indian digital rights organization Internet Freedom Foundation sent a legal notice to the Indian Government, following which, in November 2022, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India decided to remove the ban from the VLC website.
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