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India’s government wants total control of the internet

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Re: India’s government wants total control of the internet

#91

Someone who has been on the receiving end of this, I can say that they are VERY persuasive. To a point they will lock you up for sedition,without trial for a decade and if you are really lucky, some stupid judge will be allowed to let you go on a planted technicality. I am not bragging but I've survived been charged with "waging war against India" whatever the hell that means and having my wits in the moment saved my…

[flagged]

What are your views on killing of Muslims in Kashmir?

Gujarat?

Randomly being lynched for eating hamburgers?

Being expelled from their homes in Assam?

Being barred from their schools in South India?

Don’t post with a throwaway, at least have courage to voice your convictions like OP, who actually had to face down government oppression.

Re: India’s government wants total control of the internet

#92
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One solution (not an ideal solution) might be where every entity that wants to serve the citizens of a sovereign country have to have a local company that serves the local population, a local subsidiary like in most brick and mortar industries. They may even require that all compute happen locally. And of course that all content and so on meet local regulations. Sort of like what we see with other telecommunication,…

Couldn't New Delhi just tell Youtube HQ to obey worldwide and enforce it on all their subsidiaries, or lose the market? In that case it wouldn't matter how many intermediary entities are there between HQ and local operations.

Yah right now they could take that stand. In the future I can imagine an international governing body that would set rules around these things.

Re: India’s government wants total control of the internet

#93

I have learnt a very valuable lesson about my country's people at the face of the fascist govt. Caste affinity triumphs anything and everything. No matter how cruel the BJP is, their core vote bank which is the Upper caste population are not going to deviate away from them. The BJP has perfected formulas to win elections using hook or crook in every state now. Modi is going to do more fascist stuff and take away righ…

Ummm - Modi is from one of the backward classes. Amit Shah is a Jain not Hindu upper caste. The president is a tribal woman. This whole upper caste bashing doesn’t reflect reality.

Amit Shah is not a Jain. Agree otherwise. Caste is a very lazy lens to apply to the situation. Indian political parties are about power, every one of them has been illiberal. There’s BJP, but also DMK and Trinamool, who are just as intolerant of dissent at state level.

In Telangana, someone was arrested for making fun of the CM’s nose: https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/trends/andhra-student-arre...

These are all parties that are opposed to the BJP. I wish there were parties that are committed to liberalism, rule of law and institution building in India. Not very optimistic at the moment.

Re: India’s government wants total control of the internet

#95
post #7

Yes there is increasing threat to freedom of speech, but India is not new to this. The left leaning Congress had even worse norms when they imposed martial law (Emergency). India has a robust sphere of public debate and draconian laws and acts of discrimination by the government are regularly criticised. In more cases than not the government embarrasses itself by its clumsy use of power to restrict opposition, like i…

What does "allowed the Bharat Jodo Yatra" mean? Free speech and assembly is constitutionally protected - there is nothing for the government to allow or disallow.

Re: India’s government wants total control of the internet

#96

The documentary produced by the BBC "The Modi Question", was uploaded onto YouTube several times the week of release but taken down by request of the Indian Government. I was astonished a foreign entity can stop the world watching something if they don't like it, it wasn't just geo blocked it was removed off YouTube.

In the same vein, YouTube and the rest of big media (to virtually no fanfare or protest) blocked The RT for their supposed ties -- which would be fine except that RT's ties were covert. Sanctions are sanctions, but is RT to simply stop paying taxes? This is like wholesale embargo, jamming, and further insulates the Russian government from the reality of their actions.

I expect the high road from my country's communications sector on freedom of speech, and even though RT has always sucked, this behavior is distasteful.

Obviously the war is an abomination, but I'd prefer that in the interim, "platform" corporations stay the hell out of the 4D-chess.

Re: India’s government wants total control of the internet

#97
This goes beyond "just" social content, other types of data are also involved. I don't understand this policy direction.

In the cases I've been personally involved with, it added significant costs to comply to move processing and storage onto Indian territory data centers that are run by large US corporate cloud vendors anyways. If you're large enough, it doesn't matter. If your use case serves a small enough long tail where it ends up on the wrong side of that added cost burden cutoff, then it matters. And I think that is unfortunate, because I see lots of Indian innovation happening inside that long tail, and such restrictions disadvantage the smaller scale efforts where the novel propositions seem particularly rich.

But perhaps I simply don't have sufficient data and perspective, so I'd welcome Indians closer to the action to help me understand why this is in India's interests. If I had to guess, I suspect the thinking is similar to China's: it is too strategic an area to give up, and India has enough population where it doesn't matter they are ring fenced into a walled garden as "only" the domestic market is big enough to stand within its own island market.

Re: India’s government wants total control of the internet

#98

The documentary produced by the BBC "The Modi Question", was uploaded onto YouTube several times the week of release but taken down by request of the Indian Government. I was astonished a foreign entity can stop the world watching something if they don't like it, it wasn't just geo blocked it was removed off YouTube.

Available on Peertube:

https://peertube.tv/search?search=The+Modi+Question+&searchT...

Re: India’s government wants total control of the internet

#99

I have learnt a very valuable lesson about my country's people at the face of the fascist govt. Caste affinity triumphs anything and everything. No matter how cruel the BJP is, their core vote bank which is the Upper caste population are not going to deviate away from them. The BJP has perfected formulas to win elections using hook or crook in every state now. Modi is going to do more fascist stuff and take away righ…

I’m not a bjp supporter by any chance, but this logic isn’t sound. if anything bjp wants to ignore the caste logic and combine all Hindu vote bank, I believe that’s how they won. Their religious arm even goes out and says this out loud that caste was only created after/during British colonization (true or not) and it didn’t exist in Vedas. They got 40 percent of the country’s vote in last election, do you mean 40 per…

I specifically mentioned that the upper castes are their 'core' vote bank and not their only vote bank.

They have a large support from other castes now because Muslims are the enemies now. Until this narrative stays they will stay.

This tribal president and the previous dalit president are exactly what I mean by their election winning formula. I'm not sure what's illogical in any of this because this is literally what they themselves speak about in every election meeting.

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