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Comment by factorialboy | Hacker News Reader

India will be next to ban Twitter. And their govt. is not unpopular, nor will that decision be insignificant to the price of Twitter stock.

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India will be next to ban Twitter if Twitter decides to NOT abide by social media laws made by the country government which other social media companies have promised to / are working towards.

Sorry, Key context was missing.

Personal opinion: I do not think they'll outright ban it, if they do, there will be some change in public opinion for sure.

Interesting.

To me, India seemed like the most reasonable in that region.

Well, this region includes China, Afghanistan and Pakistan .. thus in comparison India does look most reasonable.

>And their govt. is not unpopular

Will they actually remain "not unpopular" if they ban Twitter?

Twitter ban is a non factor except for a minority of India's western educated elite.

Most Indian users will happily migrate to whichever platform emerges the winner after Twitter gets the boot.

The govt is unpopular already among the demographic that uses Twitter. So it won't make much difference.

Can Twitter be a concern at all for vast majority of Indian voters?

Nope. May be Facebook ban can have some impact.

Western dotcoms really need gang up together, and look at creating a solution for "unbannability."

The Facebook, Amazon, Google hosts a double digit portion of the Internet, and can take an even bigger part of it hostage.

They can easily force countries to either block Internet completely, or bend over.

Why on Earth would this be a good thing? I'm all for freedom of information, but I'm even more for foreign companies not ignoring the laws set by the government I elected.

Things get murkier when governments don't come to power in kosher ways, but I'm absolutely certain that the solution is not to have a bunch of profit-motivated companies from a completely different country and culture decide what's best for a nation. What happens when they get together and decide to make an unbannable advertising network instead?

What do you want more?

Self-determination. Always.

> Self-determination. Always.

This is the self determination of Nigerian people: https://foreignpolicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/buhari-...

You do not like it? Do you like Mr. Bukhari, and his troopers who can shoot you to death, and rob you completely randomly?

I think ousting a man who lets his men murder, and rob random people is a very good thing.

I'm not going to speak for Nigerians. If you want Nigerian opinions, ask Nigerians.

I am going to say that I don't see how laws imposed by an unelected foreign company are better than laws imposed by an unelected local government. And when we're talking about companies creating unbannable sites, we're absolutely talking about companies dictating law.

Edit: Please stop editing your comment after I've responded.

> And when we're talking about companies creating unbannable sites, we're absolutely talking about companies dictating law.

Government banning speech is a very bad thing. This usually leads to death, and violence, like a lot of it, and most extreme one.

Foreign nations and companies dictating laws to a country has historically led to much the same things.

Many people in the countries Britain colonised lived under autocracies without even a veneer of freedom. How many of those countries today appreciate Britain's actions?

How?

Honest question. These companies are large, but they don't have too much power in these countries. Especially China has a lot of internal alternatives (Aliexpress cloud and Baidu for example), so external pressure will really only help them. Case in point: Huawei's Playstore ban - this would probably have killed the phone division of a western country. Then there's the problem of biting the (kid's) hand that builds your hardware and/or servers and the one that pays your bill (AWS customers are not going to be happy when their Chinese customers are blocked).

Irrespective of the discussion on whether the tech giants taking such massive political influence is a good thing, I simply don't see how they could.

They could just allow a handful of their devforce to open source the means (software) for being able to connect to the (real and free) internet from anywhere in earth, no matter what govt rules you've to abide too or whatever!

Doesn't this happen somehow? it's just hard technically, I'm sure we can improve the UX

IP addresses, American dotcoms taken together control a double digit percentage of all IPV4 addresses.

+ Android

+ Windows

IP adresses don't matter much - China has a lot of them and in the worst case, they could simply reroute them at the firewall and reuse them internally.

Android is fully open source, oonly the play store is controlled by Google. China already has a lot of alternatives (and have a look at Huawei on how well that block worked).

Windows would put hurt a bit, yes, but cracked versions of it are not a rarity. Additionally, there's always Linux. So unless MS remote-wipes their machines (and kill themselves by doing so), it would probably not hurt either.

And if the country is smaller, like Nigeria, China will be happy to offer their help for a bit of political influence.

> And if the country is smaller, like Nigeria, China will be happy to offer their help for a bit of political influence.

And why not to let them? Half the kingdom for a privilege to kill somebody's Facebook page? A very good trade.

Dictators are even more well aware than democracies what opening the door to Beijing means. They will rather not to.

Then they will just ban the IPs?

And half of the Internet

Why would Indians want their politics to be dictated by the west? Indians sacrificed blood sweat and tears to get the British out, why should they have to fight to get the Americans out?

Right now, the educated, and progressive part of Indian society sacrifice blood sweat and tears to get Modi out.

I'd rather people are aware of solutions on a protocol level. Say for example if more people knew how to connect and use Tor.

At the moment many Nigerians have downloaded and installed (free) VPNs but I'm afraid of the massive scam that'd follow it. Many of the unknown VPN companies would just harvest people's financial information and all what not...

The solution is to not run everything from one organization.

I'd like to see Nigeria ban mastodon. Sure they could ban instances and if they got very aggressive with policing they could make it hard to host within the country but it certainly wouldn't be as easy as banning twitter was.

FANG will never do this because the centralization gives them an incredible amount of power.

It’s not that simple. Twitter has business, operations, and employees in India. Twitter can choose to stop doing business in India. This decision will hurt both Twitter and Indian economy. It’s not in the interest of both parties to keep escalating.

> It’s not in the interest of both parties to keep escalating.

I think it clearly is.

Modi is set to Robinhood them. If options are set to doing that, and winning the election, or not doing that, and loosing, he will certainly do so.

If he will be set to lose it if he not bans them, or bans them, but still lose, he will be way more pliable. Way more.

Western dotcoms are pretty impotent when it comes to the Chinese ban. Local alternatives will always crop up

> Western dotcoms are pretty impotent when it comes to the Chinese ban.

Because they never even tried.

That is literally the definition of someone calling for companies to act as gangsters and engage in racketeering.

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