Live data from Hacker News

Indonesia bans search engine DuckDuckGo on gambling, pornography concerns

reuters.com

11–20 of 37 posts

Re: Indonesia bans search engine DuckDuckGo on gambling, pornography concerns

#11

For online gambling, why not just tax the stuff? India pulls in 30% of any player's winnings as tax, for example. The gaming companies also have to pay 28% of their revenue (yes, revenue, not income).

The laws are to enforce the ruling group's religious morals.

Re: Indonesia bans search engine DuckDuckGo on gambling, pornography concerns

#12
post #4

1.5 percent of GDP in online gambling is crazy right? is it really that bad?

Could be a way to launder money into other countries?

Laundering by definition requires spending to look legal. So no.

Re: Indonesia bans search engine DuckDuckGo on gambling, pornography concerns

#13

For online gambling, why not just tax the stuff? India pulls in 30% of any player's winnings as tax, for example. The gaming companies also have to pay 28% of their revenue (yes, revenue, not income).

Taxation won't even slow paperclip maximizers... 30% is same as Apple in-app fee. See how that negatively affected mobile lootbox genre and helped Apple escape from becoming slowly but increasingly dependent on that industry.

Re: Indonesia bans search engine DuckDuckGo on gambling, pornography concerns

#14
post #11

For online gambling, why not just tax the stuff? India pulls in 30% of any player's winnings as tax, for example. The gaming companies also have to pay 28% of their revenue (yes, revenue, not income).

The laws are to enforce the ruling group's religious morals.

Perhaps, it could also be protecting the masses from exploitation of gambling companies. The odds are never in a gambler's favor.

Re: Indonesia bans search engine DuckDuckGo on gambling, pornography concerns

#15
post #7

As an Indonesian resident and a long time DDG user this is immensely frustrating. It seems to me that internet censorship is becoming more and more pervasive globally and whilst there can be legitimate reasons (eg: CSAM) blocking a search engine like DDG is a massive over-reach. Unfortunately, most Indonesians won't notice as they happily let Google, Meta et al track everything and everyone and are unlikely to be usi…

This is one reason among many that I have vpn/vps/etc.

At least duckduckgo is only blocked at the dns level!

Re: Indonesia bans search engine DuckDuckGo on gambling, pornography concerns

#16
post #3

I checked out a WiFi hotspot from a library recently and was surprised to find that they blocked DDG. (Was less surprised to see they blocked Reddit.) Isn’t it just using the Bing API?

It also proxies images, which I think is the actual reason (sic). So there is no way from a network point of view to disallow pornographic material on public access terminals. Though, I have not recently looked at how the other search engines do it. As a long time DDG user, the image filter isn't perfect and occasionally I'll see NSFW images even when I have safe search on.

I noticed on my city's public network Google Safe Search, and the DDG equivalent, is enabled by force.

Apparently for Google it's done by aliasing www.google.* to forcesafesearch.google.com [1], or for DDG: safe.duckduckgo.com [2]

[1] https://www.draytek.co.uk/support/guides/kb-dns-safesearch [2] https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/features/safe-s...

Re: Indonesia bans search engine DuckDuckGo on gambling, pornography concerns

#18
post #15
post #7

As an Indonesian resident and a long time DDG user this is immensely frustrating. It seems to me that internet censorship is becoming more and more pervasive globally and whilst there can be legitimate reasons (eg: CSAM) blocking a search engine like DDG is a massive over-reach. Unfortunately, most Indonesians won't notice as they happily let Google, Meta et al track everything and everyone and are unlikely to be usi…

This is one reason among many that I have vpn/vps/etc. At least duckduckgo is only blocked at the dns level!

My question would then be whether this easily avoidable type of blocking is a form of protest from those mandated to implement blocking.

Re: Indonesia bans search engine DuckDuckGo on gambling, pornography concerns

#19
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one reason among many that I have vpn/vps/etc. At least duckduckgo is only blocked at the dns level!

My question would then be whether this easily avoidable type of blocking is a form of protest from those mandated to implement blocking.

As is often done in Indonesia, most would probably opt to leave that unmentioned.
Post reply on HN