Nepal moves to block Facebook, X, YouTube and others

> Companies were given a deadline of Wednesday to register with the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and provide a local contact, grievance handler and person responsible for self-regulation – or face shutdown.

Maybe I'm missing something but it seems the requirements were pretty reasonable? I wonder why the affected companies decided to ignore them.

I don't know Nepal's political situation, but I could imagine companies not wanting to have a potential hostage that they're directly responsible for in more authoritarian countries. Why does there have to be a contact in the country? Couldn't they have a contact outside the country?

This tends to be the case for these sorts of regulations, so that if necessary they have a representative who can be pulled into court to answer for violations. For example, the GDPR requires an authorised European representative.

I would love Signal to register a representative, the rest of the companies listed can go die in a hole as far as I am concerned.

Maybe Youtube also, but nah, Google is almost as much a candidate for dying in a hole as Meta. Good riddance.

> Why does there have to be a contact in the country? Couldn't they have a contact outside the country?

How would that work? They obviously want someone to be inside the country, having to follow the country's laws, in case the companies decide (again) to break the laws.

If the companies don't want to have people on the ground that are liable to the law and regulations of said country, then stop offering services there.

I've read about similar requirements for physical products licensed in Europe, and my understanding is that businesses have sprung up to provide "representative as a service" to whoever needs it. So you don't need to have your own boots on the ground, just hire a local boots-provider.

this is a list of Google offices. Some of these are in countries that are classified as not free according to most democracy indexes.

https://about.google/company-info/locations/

Same story with Facebook:

https://www.metacareers.com/locations/

I would have to imagine that Nepal wants to protect its population from getting too much content from India - they would easily be overrun.

Censors always use something superficially "reasonable", and another part you're missing: there is no way anyone reasonable would do the ban for such trivial infractions if these demands were all there is to that.

The affected don't care enough about the market to submit to the demands so soon?

If it's just meant to be a contact point/grievance handler, I don't see much issue with them being in another country.

If they're meant to be "held accountable" as leverage to ensure the company's compliance ("delete this politically inconvenient content worldwide or your local employees will never see their families again"), then it seems fairly understandable why social media sites would be reluctant to give that leverage - particularly for cases like this where the bill in question seems fairly restrictive (including imprisonment for using an anonymous identity).

> If the companies don't want to have people on the ground that are liable to the law and regulations of said country, then stop offering services there.

If I want to run a Mastodon instance (which is blocked by this), do I need to hire an employee/representative for every country in the world? I'd rather just keep the maximum leverage most countries have as being to block the site if they don't like it.

They are pretty much the same as other content moderation around the world. There is some government body that determines their own content moderation policy then requires companies to implement it. Same as the EU, Brazil, etc.

I think a lot of westerners trust the EU government to use better judgement, and maybe they are even correct, but the fundamentals of the law are pretty much the same.

The biggest difference is these large companies dont really care that much about business in Nepal.

I assume you feel the same about EU's regulations.

That's the interesting thing to me. They seem quite similar fundamentally but there are a couple key differences in the dynamic.

1) Nepal is a small country so these large companies just dont have to care so much

2) People on Hackernews probably have a higher opinion of the EU's governance

But fundamentally, the laws themself seem extremely similar.

> If they're meant to be "held accountable" as leverage to ensure the company's compliance ("delete this politically inconvenient content worldwide or your local employees will never see their families again"),

Yeah, of course, similarly if US decides that they need people on the ground so they could execute them in a CIA blacksite in case they commit crimes.

But obviously that's way too much, same for Nepal, not sure why you're immediately jumping to kidnapping, rather than "So a person can be put in front of a court".

> If I want to run a Mastodon instance (which is blocked by this), do I need to hire an employee/representative for every country in the world?

If you want to operate a service at scale, which you gain profits from, in another country than where you live, it's fairly common to have some sort of representative in that country, one way or another. Usually it's ignored when the scale is small, but once you reach the size of Facebook, I think it's expected that you get some representative in the countries where you operate, yeah.

> I'd rather just keep the maximum leverage most countries have as being to block the site if they don't like it.

Exactly what we saw happen right here :) Ignore the laws, get blocked, then the companies can decide if they wanna start operating again by following local laws, or exit the country.

Ultimately, whether or not we like it, most countries have some restrictions on speech. Countries want somebody in their jurisdiction to represent the company, for companies that want to do business there. We could say their (general hypothetical “they,” I have no idea what the laws of Nepal are like specifically) laws are bad, but apparently they are not bad enough that the social media companies aren’t willing to go there.

IMO countries would be totally reasonable to demand that the moderation decisions for the citizens of their countries be made by people in-country, following their local laws, inside their jurisdiction. Countries are sovereign, not companies.

> But obviously that's way too much, same for Nepal, not sure why you're immediately jumping to kidnapping,

If legal it's "imprisonment" of the employee - and I feel it's hard to argue that's out of the question when we're talking about a bill that already threatens imprisonment just for users using an anonymous identity.

> If you want to operate a service at scale, which you gain profits from,

This doesn't have such stipultaions as far as I can tell - just any "publicly available social media platform created in cyberspace".

> Ignore the laws, get blocked

That's the idea - Nepal can exert the leverage of blocking the site, but nothing further like they could if there were employees stationed within the country.

> IMO countries would be totally reasonable to demand that the moderation decisions for the citizens of their countries be made by people in-country, following their local laws, inside their jurisdiction.

Moderation decisions are not and should not be determined solely by what's legal.

> Ultimately, whether or not we like it, most countries have some restrictions on speech. Countries want somebody in their jurisdiction to represent the company

The former is an excellent reason to refuse the latter.

This tends to happen a lot with news of regulatory policies in the global south where Western commentators will hold them to standards of libertinism that don’t even really apply in their own countries. It’s some combination of ignorance about what the regulatory environment actually is at home and a certain condescending assumption that OUR regulators are fair minded and competent but THEIR regulators must all be corrupt incompetents with an authoritarian streak.

>> IMO countries would be totally reasonable to demand that the moderation decisions for the citizens of their countries be made by people in-country, following their local laws, inside their jurisdiction.

> Moderation decisions are not and should not be determined solely by what's legal.

For sure. Following the laws of the country you want to operate in is just the bare minimum. Additional considerations can be taken, of course.

>> Ultimately, whether or not we like it, most countries have some restrictions on speech. Countries want somebody in their jurisdiction to represent the company

> The former is an excellent reason to refuse the latter.

This is where we are, the next step in this back-and-forth is that entities without any local representation get blocked.

> Following the laws of the country you want to operate in is just the bare minimum.

Absolutely. Countries you operate in, meaning countries you actually employ people in and do business in and have a legal nexus in. Being accessible over the Internet is not "operating in" a country, even if that country might wish to claim otherwise.

>not sure why you're immediately jumping to kidnapping, rather than "So a person can be put in front of a court".

Because Nepal is not known for a robust rule of law or an effective legal system. They have a particular problem with torture.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/03/29/new-nepal-police-chief-h...

https://kathmandupost.com/national/2025/06/26/nepal-fails-to...

https://amnestynepal.org/press_release/en-nepals-systemic-fa...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_of_Hom_Bahadur_Bagal...

It’s not reasonable although it can link like it. Brazil demanded the same thing, and then ended up jailing local representatives (even lawyers) and was forcing the company agreed to implement the government’s censorship. Even though it violated their constitution to demand such censorship. Ultimately these policies are just anti free speech and are an indicator of authoritarianism.

Well, however you want to call it—as I noted at the end of that comment, we’re currently living in the result of companies trying to serve users in countries without actually operating there. The result is that countries don’t really mind blocking them.

there are more than 200 countries in the world. do you expect me to hire 200 people, one in each country? and then they do what? should they have access to my servers? if not, what's even the point? to act as a translator? i am ok with having to follow local laws be able to provide services to a country. but if i have to hire people in every jurisdiction just to allow people there to use my free service, then i can't even afford to offer that service anymore.

apparently matrix is not in the ban list. i wonder how they managed to comply.

If you are offering some free service just out of the kindness of your heart, and a country decides they don’t want to let their people take you up on it, I wouldn’t stress too much about it, right? I mean, it is a shame for them if your free service is really useful, but there are people all around the world without access to it…

Lots of countries seem to be scrutinizing large social media companies more aggressively than small volunteer projects. These sort of companies definitely can afford local representatives. They are businesses, if they aren’t making enough money in the country to justify the representatives, they can make the business decision to pull out.

The can't be bothered. FA*NG companies care about China and the USA because that's where the money is. They resentfully pay a little attention to the EU. Nobody at these companies has time for Nepal.

Even their HQ is in a country that is classified as a "flawed democracy," and might be classified as a "hybrid regime" in 2025 wink, wink

nobody asked Matrix to comply with this (as far as I know). like Mastodon/ActivityPub, it's a bit of a lost cause to try to block a decentralised protocol in practice.

i wonder why though. i don't think matrix is small enough that they haven't noticed it, and since mastodon is on the list they either don't understand decentralized services, or they misunderstood mastodon. that's the only explanation i can think of.

Having direct business to consumer relations with the people of a country is doing business in that country, even if the multinational corporation claims otherwise

how to you prosecute a company that isn't represented in your country ? and how do you get someone, I mean a person, in front of court ?

As far as I know, Nepal can't send its police to America to arrest Facebook CEO and bring him back.

Let's just pretend for a second: Meta deliberately allows pedophiles to organize themselves and abduct Nepalese kids. Nepal government can only publicly object, eventually block Facebook access and that's all ? Nepalese wouldn't be very happy about that.

I am surprised there are even countries where these big corporations don't already have legal representation. It's not like it's expensive compared to what they earn from Nepalese.

They use torture on nobodies.

Let's not kid ourselves, TikTok representative or Meta ones aren't going to be treated the same way that a random Nepalese. They get the golden jails.

The reason they don't want legal representative is because they would rather avoid liability and be able to do whatever the fuck they want in other's countries.

suspect they compiled a list of platforms where they had found anti-Nepalese content of whatever flavour, and there just happens to be none on Matrix.

How else can these companies be compelled to follow local laws?

Why would you assume it's anti-nepalese content and not some other kind of objectionable content, like child pornography?

Direct contact without any money is not business.

That's like arguing a Seattle coffee roaster is doing business in Nepal because someone in Nepal called them on the phone.

i have not checked every service affected in Nepal, but i would assume most of them require a user account, which includes agreeing to a contract that establishes a b2c relation. Such a relationship does not necessarily require payment, and is not at all comparable to calling someone.

Similar requirements exist in India too.

Nepal seems to have no shortage of people willing to take money to act as a local representative. I've seen quite a few such offers recently.