Airtel, Reliance Jio, BSNL, DEN blocking DuckDuckGo, complain users

Airtel and Reliance Jio users are complaining that well-known privacy focused search engine DuckDuckGo has been silently blocked by these two internet service providers in India. Broadband providers like Den and BSNL too have blocked access to DuckDuckGo. This comes a day after the government announced that it has banned 59 apps of Chinese origin in the country. Having said that the government has not blocked or announced any order against DuckDuckGo. Meanwhile, Airtel and Reliance Jio haven’t provided any reason for blocking DuckDuckGo search engine and claimed that blocking DuckDuckGo is as per DoT (Department of Telecommunications) order.
“What is wrong with DDG? It’s one of the most sane things on the internet, and it has been blocked since morning. Why doesn’t DOT give out full details of what sites are blocked or not to the public? Also, this is ridiculous, does anyone here know about how the procedure works inside DOT when comes to taking a decision to block a service?” wrote a user on Reddit.
Several Reliance Jio users also took to Twitter to highlight their plight as well but tweets went unanswered by both Airtel and Jio. However, DuckDuckGo officially confirmed the issue and tweeted, “To our users in India: We’ve received many reports our search engine is unreachable by much of India right now and have confirmed it is not due to us. We’re actively talking to Internet providers to get to the bottom of it ASAP. Thank you for your patience.”

You can use DuckDuckGo as the default search engine even within the Google Chrome app on your phone. Google offers five search engine choices to users in the Chrome app. These include DuckDuckGo, Yahoo India, Bing, Yandex and of course Google Search. To change the search engine on Google Chrome app, go to Settings menu and change.