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?

> 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.

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.

> 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.