Nepal moves to block Facebook, X, YouTube and others

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.

> 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.

>> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.