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Comment by rippercushions | Hacker News Reader

Oh yes there are: telco incumbents fight furiously to protect their turf. This is why it's 2022 and it's still illegal (!) to provide video calls over the Internet in the UAE.

https://www.travelizta.com/frequent-question-why-cant-i-make...

Neal Stephenson goes into this in some detail in his 1996 classic:

https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

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The UAE's connectivity isn't actually bad. Latency to most of SEA is quite good (50ms to India, 80ms to Singapore).

But for what I assume to be political reasons latency to Europe is about 20 or 30ms higher then what it could be .

When I was there, I could get sub 100ms latency to France using a Wireguard tunnel to an AWS server in Bahrain, while direct connections were closer to 120-130ms.

Overall though, I found connectivity in the UAE to be absolutely fine by middle eastern standards.

Sure, the connectivity itself is fine, the thing that's pathetic is that the only reason they ban calls is to try to protect Etisalat's long-distance phone revenue and to funnel people into its paid alternatives (are they still charging from Botim?).

Does the uae even benefit from this? The cable is on the other side of the African continent

Zoom calls do work in Dubai.

Video call on teams also works

Yes but WhatsApp and FB calling do not. As I understand it, Zoom only started working reliably during Covid as companies needed it to

End-to-end encrypted calling is illegal in Dubai, so not surprising that WhatsApp does not work.

This. It is more about end-to-end encryption and the government wanting to have the certs to decrypt stuff if necessary.

I was in Dubai twice earlier this year, and among other people I met with Dr Marwan Alzarouni, who helped create the first certificate authority in UAE many years ago. And their group have now released an app that has all your info and you choose what verified credentials to present.

https://community.intercoin.app/t/qbix-and-intercoin-around-...

Monaco and Dubai are “police states” if you will, with cameras everywhere and end to end encryption technically illegal. Many people (tourists, businessmen) seem to like that.

Why Monaco? https://www.gp-digital.org/world-map-of-encryption/

The fact that the country may require decryption in legal cases is not limited to Monaco, UK is the same.

France has restrictions as well, in the US encryption is munition.

Does Zoom count as a video meeting instead of a video call?

Maybe a loophole they found.

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