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Comment by OGEnthusiast | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit surprised how under-the-radar this story is in the mainstream press. It doesn't seem un-thinkable at all that in 5-10 years, countries will have digital borders to block certain countries from participating in their subset of the Internet. There's no way a Trump or Trump-like figure wouldn't love the ability to digitally block an entire country at their whim (like how he is doing with tariff rates now). And unlike a decade ago, it will be sold to the citizens with not much effort at all, especially if the current wave of protectionism/nationalism continues to hold.

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To be honest there are some countries I'd love to be able to block myself. There's only criminal shit coming from them. All the scams, hacks, the "hello sir I'm calling from Microsoft" or the "We are looking for likes for $500 per day" crap.

But the bigger problem is that it won't work. They'll just set up PoPs in country. The law has never stopped criminals. They are criminals after all, breaking the law is a given.

If it did work a ban would give those countries a big kick up the ### to actually do something about it. Many countries just let it happen because of corruption. Sometimes something is done like recently in Myanmar but it's very rare and usually just for show.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/22/un_asian_scam_calls/

For a while now I've been toying with the idea of national governments creating official forums that require some sort of verification of national ID to post on.

There are obviously a lot of other issues with social media sites like Reddit or HN but imagine how different local community subreddits would be if there was some way to know that the person you're talking to actually has some personal stake in the community and people there.

Personally I'd still want to slum it up on the non-regulated social media sites but I'd post on the pseudo-anonymous community sites and take what others have to say more seriously on there.

I would love that as an option in general. Yes it can be abused but that can be said for literally everything. The ability to actually have local networks as an option would be a blessing though.

I can see a certain group of people that would be chomping at the bit to be able to digitally block news and media coming out of a certain place exposing war crimes for all to see.

This is already happening in a number of countries in some way or another

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