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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

> Experts in the country question whether these requests have any legal authority

As much as it sucks that Twitter is forced to do this, the government of neither Russia or Pakistan has a legal system which I would trust to fully respect the rule of law in this matter--either is likely to simply block the service if the requests are not acknowledged.

As principled as Google's stand was in refusing to pull an offensive video, it probably did more to stifle the free flow of information than had they pulled the "offensive" video on request. At least that way people would have an idea of which specific videos the government didn't want them to see, rather than the entire site being blocked out.

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No, really, no. Russian users will notice that Twitter is being blocked by the government a lot more than they'll notice that a few tweets have been blocked. Twitter has the position, and responsibility, to play hardball with these governments. A few days of lost revenue from a Russian block is nothing compared to the lost revenue from an entire nation under tyranny.

Only in China do you have a population so brainwashed that they think these things are being done for their benefit. Russians have an active dissent. Feed it; It will bear fruit.

I'm from China and I just don't know how to refute your last line. Google has been blocked for about half a month now, but average people would not feel a thing about it.

That's just sad.

But that's not on account of brainwashing, that's could be on account of having no need for it. I've lived in China for 5 years and have survived without Google fine. Could also be that most young/modern Chinese have an apathetic split-mind: don't give a shit about Google and don't give a shit about who is blocking them from it or why. They aren't uninformed, they just don't care.

I think that is because China has such a home grown ecosystem for google/twitter etc. alternatives

Russia? Not so much I think.

Yandex is the 4th largest search engine in the world and #1 in Russia. I'm pretty sure they have a large local social network as well but the name has slipped my mind.

VKontakte?

The last line about China seems extremely unnecessary and inaccurate.

I am Chinese. In practice blocking Twitter and Youtube protects Chinese companies like SinaWeibo and Youku from competing with their American rivals. The point is that China is a market big enough to play the game on its own courtyard.

For the record, I've yet to see any North Koreans respond to my comment... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7886916

>Only in China do you have a population so brainwashed that they think these things are being done for their benefit. Russians have an active dissent. Feed it; It will bear fruit.

Well, and only in America they believe such naive things.

For one, Russian people voted predominantly for Putin. The "dissent" you mention is mostly the US promoting some of his political rivals, feeding them (you nailed that one) and over-playing them for western audiences, so as to make a big fuss out of nothing to try to influence Russian policy for its own purposes. That's 90% of the "active dissent".

And China is a world player. They want (and deserve) their own Google or Twitter, not to be tied to externally controlled services. (Of course people whose own country is doing the controlling will disagree). Those kind of actions enable local players to sweep the market (why send control of internet search and ads to Mountain View?).

In Pakistan (from where I am from) the laws we have in place do not actually state who, if anyone, within the country can block anything on the internet. So despite 1. court orders to the effect that the government must seek ways of blocking only only offending content on youtube and not whole website 2. a resolution in the national assembly that youtube should be unblocked nothing has happened towards unblocking. Activists have gone around and convinced everyone possible that youtube should be blocked. Everyone has claimed they are open to youtube being unblocked. Yet it remains blocked.

>As principled as Google's stand was in refusing to pull an offensive video, it probably did more to stifle the free flow of information than had they pulled the "offensive" video on request.

It definitely feels like a lose-lose situation for liberty when governments can pressure websites to censor at the risk of a total block.

Google is currently working on a crowdsourced proxy called uProxy in order to push back against censorship. If uProxy succeeds, it will no longer be necessary to meet censors half way.

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