Hacker News Reader

Comment by asaddhamani | Hacker News Reader

Data from Indian transactions should be stored and ideally even processed in India. This seems fair and reasonable to me.

View on HN

What makes it fair and reasonable and does whatever rationale you use here not open up the door to further nativism?

I mean if it is fair and reasonable that Indian transactions should be stored and processed in India, is it not also fair and reasonable that goods sold in India should be made in India, that movies that show in India should be made in India, that all news consumed in India should be written in India?

I get these are not the same, but what is the real difference here? Where does it become unreasonable in my examples and why?

There is not a single country in the world where largest bank is not a bank based in that country. Like money, data is something sovereign nations want to control.

EU, China and India all have areas where they want US based firms to store data in a specific way. This isn't changing anytime soon.

BCR and BRD, the largest Romanian banks, are owned by Austria and France.

I'd be shocked if most big banks in Eastern Europe are owned locally.

The opposite of what you're saying is true for almost every average or small country, economically.

There is a huge difference to your other examples. The US does not actually have a good track record with protecting their customers with proper privacy laws.

I'm not sure what that has to do with this. There could be laws requiring that the data be kept secure and private without specifying that it has to be kept in a certain location.

Besides which, India doesn't have a good track record of protecting privacy either.

True, but if it's not hosted under your own control it basically is fully out of your control. Doesn't the US gov / the 3 letter agencies basically have access to everything hosted within the US?

Sure there are other ways, but India seems to like to go for the most radical solutions at times

They also seem to have access to everything that goes through the submarine cables near their shores.

So data is spied on just by being routed near them, it is not needed for them to be the destination.

US having access to indian date has limited impact on india while Indian govt having same data have major impact on india

I don't disagree. It is dystopian, but so is a single country having access to the majority of the world's transactions.

> is it not also fair and reasonable that goods sold in India should be made in India, that movies that show in India should be made in India, that all news consumed in India should be written in India?

Of course, thats what every country wants, and they develop policies that give tax breaks or concessions to local businesses. That's why tariffs were enacted.

I'm sorry, I don't really get your point, maybe you can restate it?

It was a question as evidenced by the question marks.

Your answer, as far as I can discern, is that it "Of course" it is "fair and reasonable that goods sold in India should be made in India, that movies that show in India should be made in India, that all news consumed in India should be written in India."

That's all there is to it, question asked, and answered.

You think it is fair for companies to be required to run servers in every country they operate in? That seems pretty wasteful and inefficient to me.

It's a billion person country.

It might not make sense for every country to demand things like this, but that doesn't mean it doesn't make sense for giant countries too, and it doesn't make it inefficient.

At India's scale costs are already amortized anyways, but worse, consider India's physical location. It's surrounded by hostile nations (Myanmar, China, Pakistan, make a wall around it). To get data out of the country you're talking about moving it through hostile territory, or moving it through vulnerable subsea cables. Not only is the bandwidth probably more wasteful than the extra compute needed to spin up another set of servers to serve the billion people in India, but the network cannot be relied on to keep working during any sort of crisis.

Luxembourg or whatever demanding all data processing happening internally would be meaningfully different. It's less than a million people to amortize over instead of more than a billion. It's next door to allies which the data could reasonably be stored and processed in, instead of isolated. But we're not talking about whether or not Luxembourg should demand this, we're talking about whether or not India should.

Afaik, Myanmar is not a hostile country. Neither the elected government nor the military dictatorship has animosity at the state level.

China and India are not friends. China needs Myanmar because it would allow it to transfer its goods faster and cheaper: no need to go around through Strait of Malacca.

If pro-China government is installed in Myanmar it means that it automatically becomes hostile to India.

Controlling trade routes explains many wars and coups.

To be honest I know next to nothing about Myanmar<->India relations. Everyone has been suggesting that the new Myanmar government is closely related to China, so I was substituting in the China<->India relations.

Right now yes. However any neighboring country with a recent coup doesn't fill you with confidence.

Data can also move by satellite.

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe there is meaningful amounts of bandwidth available via satellite today. Even something like starlink today is just a bent pipe from ground station to ground station (and is super recent).

Whatever bandwidth is available would undoubtedly be quickly consumed if the land lines were cut...

Nowhere near enough.

We require businesses to register themselves, to file taxes in every country, etc, etc. We don't have global governments, and supervision of local financial data for fraud/criminal activity should be done locally. It sounds to me like its more efficient compared to the alternative.

If it was wasteful, then there would be no CDNs like Akamai and Cloudflare.

And Netflix would not have data centers in virtually every ISP in the world.

Ohh poor Netflix, the bandwidth costs are so unfair to them!

Mastercard isn't Netflix. The amount of bandwidth is likely orders of magnitude less.

Why does it matter where the data is located?

It matters which jurisdiction can order the data to be decrypted.

There are 196 countries in the world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com