Seems to indicate they're not actually trying to prevent their citizens from doing anything in particular, they're just trying to get these international companies to follow their local laws since they operate there.
The move seems to not be about blocking citizens access or trying to prevent communication at all, but rather to punish those specific companies because they weren't following the law, since there are companies who weren't blocked.
If you reframe the issue from "Nepal wants to punish the users" to "Nepal wants to punish the companies", implementing an easy DNS block makes a lot more sense. As long as most users are unable to access the platforms, the companies will get hurt by it, I think the idea is at least.
For example, we really don’t know what to do with news like this here, most of us just go on with our lives.
It is more like: a lot of people see social media sites as damaging, so they don’t particularly care when their governments ban them for whatever arbitrary reasons the governments come up with.
So, I’d expect the more that social media sites come back online to reflect their responsiveness to dealing with government demands, not the damaging-ness.
I think their source code is up on, like, GitHub or something. Blocking GitHub seems a bit too far for most countries. Who knows, maybe folks in Nepal will figure out a workaround using the source code.
From experience, this is a symptom of them wanting to censor a specific piece of content which is on all those platforms. Look for it, you may discover something interesting.
I live in Tunisia, which had one of the most censored internet in the world before 2011.
See, companies that deal with a lot of traffic on static data have geographically distributed caches.
Let's say Steam has a major game release, and gets slammed with the DL traffic of 5 million gamers all around the world trying to get their hands at that new game all at once. However, Steam has an instruction manual that allows any ISP to set up their own cache servers. So an ISP that has a cache set up can convert a lot of that global traffic to local traffic, saving them money, and offering users a better experience.
(One small ISP I knew had it set up so that all traffic to their local Steam cache was fully exempt from client rate limiting, reportedly because the ISP's admins were avid gamers.)
Other services like major CDNs, YouTube or Netflix may have deals with ISPs to locate their caching hardware on ISP premises, or may buy their own caching servers in specific datacenters. Same idea applies - it's cheaper for both ISPs and web services when the users hit local caches than when they "cache miss" and generate global traffic.
VPN use is a "forced cache miss", so it's a loss-loss for both ISPs and web services.
Also mentioned here, larger corps have local caches which unloads transit significantly. Google does this for YouTube everywhere.
Depends on who you ask. I'd consider it damaging but nowhere near as damaging as X in recent times. And would consider FB worse that both for sheer the hysteria it generates in the old.
Nepal is classified as a Hybrid Regime [0] in democracy rankings.
Following the end of the civil war, power has largely consolidated amongst 3 players - KP Sharma Oli, Sher Bahadur Deuba, and Prachanda - who play a game of musical chairs.
Ofc, both China and India are constantly interfering in Nepali politics and building random coalitions with permutations of these three along with smaller parties.
Whenever India feels Nepal is leaning too pro-China, some crisis happens, and whenever China feels Nepal is leaning to pro-India, some crisis also happens.
Indian state politics also plays a role, because the states of Sikkim, Uttarakhand, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh have significant ethnic ties in Nepal (eg. Bihar's CM Nitish Kumar's family are Maithili with family ties across the borders, and his opponent Lalu Prasad Yadav has backed Yadav political movements in Nepal as well; UP's CM Yogi Adityanath is a Garhwali Rajput who used to lead a Hindu sect that was patronized by the Nepali royal family and still has significant pull in Nepal; and Sikkim's former CM Pawan Kumar Chamling was part of a ethno-tribal movement amongst Janjatis/Tibeto-Burman tribals who were at the bottom rung of the Nepal during it's monarchical rule; KP Sharma Oli grew up in a village barely 20 miles from Naxalbari right when the Naxalite/Maoist insurgency began in West Bengal), which adds another layer of complexity, because state level politics often leaks across both Nepal and India.
The bill and requirments doesn't seem unreasonable, atleast according to https://www.lawgandhi.com/social-media-bill-2081-2025/
America is ranked as a flawed democracy within the EIU - just like Israel, South Korea, and Italy - which I would say is a fairly accurate take about the state of American democracy.
> When most people in China
It's hard to tell whether Chinese think one way or the other, as these kinds of polls are tightly held. That said, protests are fairly common in China, and the rate of labor unrest within China has risen dramatically compared to the past 10 years [0]
You don't seem to have seen the videos of people being shoved into vans when they try to exercise their right to lodge grievances about government corruption.
These plans all include unlimited data and an Xfinity gateway.
You aren't required to use their gateway, although they will still ship one to you unless you ask them not to. There is no discount for not using it. Unlimited is tied to the account, not the modem or gateway so you still get unlimited if you use your own modem. Same if you use their gateway but put it in bridge mode and supply your own router.
For new customers each of the new plans can be gotten at an introductory discount. The discount price is guaranteed for 1 year or 5 years (your choice, with 1 year generally giving a steeper discount). These are all month to month plans so you aren't locked into a contract.
Existing customers can switch to the new plans. There is no discount but they do get the 1 year or 5 year price guarantee.
we can't complain ;)
Good luck trying to do any of that in China. US and other democratic societies may have warts, but there is a huge gap between those systems and China.
If the DNS change solution ever works, because they are half-assing it for whatever reason. And this time they apparently aren't.
And in any case, this is a really bad way to look at this situation. Your response to the government taking the next step in what looks like a very well planned power grab and move towards authoritarianism shouldn't be "well the ISPs suck here".
I had a quick look at the maps I could find that indicated the locations of Mastodon server instances, and I was not able to find anything local to their - of course that's not to say there is not one or more. It is important to the network that there should be many Mastodon instances, in many places, so it would be great if there were some!