The app appears to be available in the US on the App Play store.
Google, Apple cave to Pakistan pressure to take down apps by Ahmadiyya Muslims
201–210 of 515 posts
Re: Google, Apple cave to Pakistan pressure to take down apps by Ahmadiyya Muslims
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
I personally worked for a large tech company and was involved with 'content filtering discussions' with questionable regimes. HN doesn't like such arguments, it's not an argument, just an experience. It's common. Pragmatically speaking, it's much harder for Pakistan to filter the entire web, than control international conglomerates which they generally can do. We need diversity in search, and absolutely need to have…
> Apple's 30% cut is a pretty obvious harm once you do the economic calculation. Not really. You have to compare it to a counter-factual, and those are generally made up to support whatever position you already hold. Also, it’s not 30%. It’s 15% for almost all developers.
Evidence of Apple's monopoly are actually baked right into that rate. They are price-setters, not subject to the whims of the market, and adjust their prices given non-market forces (press, threat of regulation etc.)
It's a high enough number that it absolutely changes outcomes, meaning at minimum less choice for consumers and higher cost, and implicitly, a whole host of lost opportunity.
In particular, there are tons of Enterprise apps that can't feasibly operate on Apple due to issues concerning Apple wanting to take the entirety of their profit.
As a small operation, in the corner of the economy, it doesn't matter, but this is unfolding like the Edison/Tesla/Westinghouse battles of the last century and we know how that ended up.
Re: Google, Apple cave to Pakistan pressure to take down apps by Ahmadiyya Muslims
#203For those defending this practice, consider carefully the implications of what you are advocating. On one hand you have a government deciding who can and cannot refer to themselves as adherents of a particular religion (by declaring that Ahamadis cannot call themselves Muslim). On another hand you have Google and Apple, yet again, being the complicit chokepoints of “free speech”, with regard to app developers. These…
> On another hand you have Google and Apple, yet again, being the complicit chokepoints of “free speech”, with regard to app developers.
And how is that detail is pertinent to this discussion?
If it wasn't Google or Apple it would be other companies. Even if it wasn't large companies it would be 100 smaller companies and all those 100 smaller companies would have to comply (even more so because they have fewer resources to fight a government deciding things in their own country).
Re: Google, Apple cave to Pakistan pressure to take down apps by Ahmadiyya Muslims
#204We have been seeing deplatforming happen more and more these last few months. Seems like this is going to accelerate a decentralized Internet.
It's going to be exciting times with a lot of societal questions and problems to be answered as these new technologies take off and the old model of advertising and free services for personal data get replaced with a new model.
Re: Google, Apple cave to Pakistan pressure to take down apps by Ahmadiyya Muslims
#205For those defending this practice, consider carefully the implications of what you are advocating. On one hand you have a government deciding who can and cannot refer to themselves as adherents of a particular religion (by declaring that Ahamadis cannot call themselves Muslim). On another hand you have Google and Apple, yet again, being the complicit chokepoints of “free speech”, with regard to app developers. These…
The (rather massive) flaw in your reasoning is the idea that Google and Apple are the solution to the problem. If you live in a society without religious freedom, that's a big problem, but Apple and Google can't fix it. If you care about the problem, it's important to understand this. If you succeed in getting people to focus on symptom of the problem and not the cause, you will help prevent it from being addressed.
> The (rather massive) flaw in your reasoning is the idea that Google and Apple are the solution to the problem.
Nor should they even attempt to, because the moment they get involved in policy making you have an army of HNs complaining how large corporations influence politics.
Re: Google, Apple cave to Pakistan pressure to take down apps by Ahmadiyya Muslims
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pakistan only gets to decide what they can practically influence. Apple and Google could design their phones in a way where it’s not possible for Pakistan to wholesale prevent people from using a piece of software.
At which point said phone is no longer available for purchase in Pakistan. This attitude pervades tech-inclined folk's discussions of politics, as if the Internet is somehow above the laws and culture of the places where it operates, especially with regard to the global south. Just because you either don't comprehend or don't respect a given culture enough to learn about it, doesn't mean it no longer applies to you.…
I mean, to step past the common dodge of moral relativism, the whole thing behind this is a tacit agreement amongst a lot of tech-inclined folk that quite a few cultures (including powerful, western cultural movements, past-and-present) are just plain evil. So we're using whatever tools we have to subvert and change these cultures, and we're putting leverage on companies we have cultural hegemony over to try to work around - in whatever ways they can - laws that we consider similarly evil. It's a culture war, plain and simple. I've chosen to use "we" here to be honest about my own affiliations in this particular case (of anti-Ahmadiyya censorship).
A company like Google might not have the power to say no to censorship in China, but they're a lot more likely to have considerable heft against a nation that can't credibly mount a replacement for something like Google. Laws aren't absolute - like all other human institutions, they're subject to pressure. Put enough pressure on and they can switch from something being forbidden to being allowed. (In the past, corporate pressure has been "up to and including outright overthrow of a government", in the case of what was done to the Honduras on behalf of the United Fruit Company, so ... some options are off the table because they're immoral, but corporate pressure don't have any hard ceiling on what it can theoretically accomplish.)
Re: Google, Apple cave to Pakistan pressure to take down apps by Ahmadiyya Muslims
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
The (rather massive) flaw in your reasoning is the idea that Google and Apple are the solution to the problem. If you live in a society without religious freedom, that's a big problem, but Apple and Google can't fix it. If you care about the problem, it's important to understand this. If you succeed in getting people to focus on symptom of the problem and not the cause, you will help prevent it from being addressed.
Apple and Google put themselves in a position where they became a part of the problem. If they ran open platforms where they don't have to power to ban apps this would never have happened.
How come would that not happen? Apps come from somewhere and they are installed on someone's platform. The government can simply ask the provider of those apps to stop providing them and/or the provider of the platform to stop allowing for them to be installed. Your only choice then is to comply or stop doing business in that country.
So the only reasonable complaint I could see against these companies now is "maybe they should have stopped doing business in that country" which would allow them to take the high moral road. Ofc that wouldn't necessarily result in better freedom for the people in the country, just fewer services than the rest of the world but it is a possible choice.
Re: Google, Apple cave to Pakistan pressure to take down apps by Ahmadiyya Muslims
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet England feel way more secular than USA in practice, given how much Christianity seems to matter in US politics.
The highly religious nature of US settlers is directly connected to our secular freedoms. A lot of early settlers were pretty extreme practicers of their religions and faced persecution in Europe. They left to practice their religion in a place where they wouldn't be burned as a heretic. It's interesting that these opposing extremists were able to get along separately by agreeing to keep the government secular
> They left to practice their religion in a place where they wouldn't be burned as a heretic.
Not true, at least in the obvious case of the Pilgrims of Plymouth. They were perfectly free to practice their religion when they lived in the Netherlands. They moved away because they wanted to create their own strict theocratic colony. The Netherlands, in their eyes, had too much religious freedom.
Re: Google, Apple cave to Pakistan pressure to take down apps by Ahmadiyya Muslims
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
I generally support what you're saying, however there are two complicating factors with the Parler deplatforming that make me tolerate it. Not accept it, but tolerate it. 1. Parler was being used specifically to plan out acts of terrorism; and their moderation team took no action to stop it 2. Parler was not a free speech platform On that first bit: while I generally want big platforms to be regulated like common car…
Parler was not used by the rioters. Nobody who was arrested planned anything on Parler, but they did use Facebook and Twitter.
"But Facebook did it too" isn't a great argument for Parler. If anything, you're arguing for more legal pressure on Facebook, not for getting Parler their AWS account back.
Re: Google, Apple cave to Pakistan pressure to take down apps by Ahmadiyya Muslims
#210For those defending this practice, consider carefully the implications of what you are advocating. On one hand you have a government deciding who can and cannot refer to themselves as adherents of a particular religion (by declaring that Ahamadis cannot call themselves Muslim). On another hand you have Google and Apple, yet again, being the complicit chokepoints of “free speech”, with regard to app developers. These…
> On another hand you have Google and Apple, yet again, being the complicit chokepoints of “free speech”, with regard to app developers. And how is that detail is pertinent to this discussion? If it wasn't Google or Apple it would be other companies. Even if it wasn't large companies it would be 100 smaller companies and all those 100 smaller companies would have to comply (even more so because they have fewer resour…
Smaller companies might not have as much commercial exposure in Pakistan - i.e. if they have no formal business presence there, what would be the consequences for them not complying? For example, if these "apps" were traditional Windows executables instead who would the government on Pakistan lean on to get them blocked? The best they could do is attempt a "great firewall of China" style block on internet traffic itself.