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.