Facebook, Google and Twitter Rebel Against Pakistan's Censorship Rules (nytimes.com) 74
When Pakistan's government unveiled some of the world's most sweeping rules on internet censorship this month, global internet companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter were expected to comply or face severe penalties -- including the potential shutdown of their services. Instead, the tech giants banded together and threatened to leave the country and its 70 million internet users in digital darkness. The New York Times: Through a group called the Asia Internet Coalition, they wrote a scathing letter to Pakistan's prime minister, Imran Khan. In it, the companies warned that "the rules as currently written would make it extremely difficult for AIC Members to make their services available to Pakistani users and businesses." Their public rebellion, combined with pressure and lawsuits from local civil libertarians, forced the government to retreat. The law remains on the books, but Pakistani officials pledged this week to review the regulations and undertake an "extensive and broad-based consultation process with all relevant segments of civil society and technology companies." "Because Pakistan does not have any law of data protection, international internet firms are reluctant to comply with the rules," said Usama Khilji, director of Bolo Bhi, an internet rights organization based in Islamabad, the country's capital.
The standoff over Pakistan's digital censorship law, which would give regulators the power to demand the takedown of a wide range of content, is the latest skirmish in an escalating global battle. Facebook, Google and other big tech companies, which have long made their own rules about what is allowed on their services, are increasingly tangling with national governments seeking to curtail internet content that they consider harmful, distasteful or simply a threat to their power. India is expected to unveil new censorship guidelines any day now, including a requirement that encrypted messaging services like WhatsApp tell the government how specific messages moved within their networks. The country has also proposed a new data privacy law that would restrict the activities of tech companies while exempting the government from privacy rules.
The standoff over Pakistan's digital censorship law, which would give regulators the power to demand the takedown of a wide range of content, is the latest skirmish in an escalating global battle. Facebook, Google and other big tech companies, which have long made their own rules about what is allowed on their services, are increasingly tangling with national governments seeking to curtail internet content that they consider harmful, distasteful or simply a threat to their power. India is expected to unveil new censorship guidelines any day now, including a requirement that encrypted messaging services like WhatsApp tell the government how specific messages moved within their networks. The country has also proposed a new data privacy law that would restrict the activities of tech companies while exempting the government from privacy rules.
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Apparently Pakistan broke the one cardinal rule (Score:5, Insightful)
You can cut into profits with your laws, but if your laws become too restrictive, it is more profitable to not do business with you. Finding that sweet spot is basically the business countries are in.
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Sure they can, but would the Pakistani users want that? Would you want to replace Google with Baidu? And Youtube with Youku? Would you want to replace a mostly useful service with one that's crippled by censorship?
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The same way people in a Germany, France, New Zealand, Canada, Communist China and Australia adjust their own day to day internet use to what a gov sets as legal use.
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So ... circumventing it with VPN?
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Cuba? Venezuela
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With very strange, very powerful telco/publication and political laws on internet use.
With govs and mil that have police powers over all internet use.
Others just like to fine and tax US brands using the full power of their own gov
Re:Apparently Pakistan broke the one cardinal rule (Score:5, Insightful)
Would you want to replace a mostly useful service with one that's crippled by censorship?
When you frame the question that way, most people say, "Of course not!".
When you frame the question as, "Do you want to allow sex trafficker rapists who kidnap your daughters and force them into sex-slavery to continue to hide their activities in the existing services or would you like a safer alternative," people might just say yes.
It doesn't have to be that extreme. Could just be, "Do you want to allow PragerU to be shown to your children?" You see enough calls for censorship here, over every conceivable issue, from people who ought to know better.
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I actually want PragerU to be available. Not only because I enjoy good comedy. But because I think that censorship doesn't serve much of a purpose.
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If I ever have a kid, and IF I decide there's something inappropriate for them on the internet; *I* will make that decision and *I* will set up the MDM and controls on their devices to filter content as *I* deem appropriate. It's no one else's business. And as for the obvious retort: if said hypothetical child figures out how to bypass every control I know how to implement and view the internet entirely unrestricted, then they're smart enough and grown up enough to go ahead and view PragerU or (much more
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Sure they can, but would the Pakistani users want that?
If they cared about what the users want they wouldn't censor it in the first place. This isn't about what users want, it's about controlling their populace.
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That only works if you don't overdo it. You can only censor so much before people start working around your censorship, and then you don't control anything anymore.
Re: Apparently Pakistan broke the one cardinal rul (Score:1)
"Would you want to replace a mostly useful service with one that's crippled by censorship?"
While I agree Big Brother Google's services are crippled by censorship, I think it's a stretch to describe the Chinese clones as "mostly useful".
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What business is facebook, google and twitter doing with Pakistan?
Pakistan has ~200 million people. It's not China, but it's not nothing either. These companies want to rule the world. Including Pakistan.
The OP is right of course. Would the cost of creating a Pakistan-safe Facebook/Google/Twitter be worth it? Probably, but if they can band together and muscle Pakistan into dropping the requirement then it costs nothing (except what it costs to draft a few harshly worded letters).
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Could be a moral issue too. Lots of companies make piles of cash out of China but Google decided to forego that profit. Apple and Microsoft have no such qualms. AMD partnered with a Chinese company to make AMD CPUs without the NSA backdoors in them under a Chinese brand.
So... (Score:5, Interesting)
Can we have that argument again about how corporations are exerting the kind of pressure over freedom of speech as normally reserved for governments?
Or is that not a thing?
Re:So... (Score:5, Interesting)
Whew - doesn't this smell eerily familiar to some William Gibson and/or Neal Stephenson fiction. i.e. companies basically having more power than many countries. I know it's always been in the background of late; But this story, to me, really brings up memories from some of those stories from a few decades ago.
Even if I support the companies actions this time... What about next time?
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Even if I support the companies actions this time... What about next time?
Here's one thing. At least companies have a motive to please you... they want you to buy their shit. Governments on the other hand get paid by you whether they provide you a service or not.
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What shit does Facebook and Twitter want me to buy? They want to please their customers, but customers and users aren't necessarily the same thing.
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What shit does Facebook and Twitter want me to buy? They want to please their customers, but customers and users aren't necessarily the same thing.
No, but without users, they have no customers.
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What shit does Facebook and Twitter want me to buy?
All of the shit they show you in ads?
They want to please their customers, but customers and users aren't necessarily the same thing.
Their "customers" (aka advertisers) pay them based on the numbers "users" that see the ads on their platforms. Users come back when they like the service. Fewer users == fewer customers.
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Even if I support the companies actions this time... What about next time?
Couldn't you make that argument about just about any large power structure?
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The US was started by a series of companies.
Ok... I'll bite. Name those companies.
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Monticello.
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Companies? There are individuals with more power than some countries.
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I dunno, maybe Pakistan is trying to get rid of Twitter and Facebook so they can replace them with local alternatives. If you can't compete just ban the competition.
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Does it align with their stated corporate mission and fiduciary responsibility?
The answer to both questions is identical.
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Democracy vs the demands of US ad money
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I suppose the charitable side of this argument is that local governments are trying to keep a lid on the internal tribal grievances and ethnic violence within their borders that the big Internet companies seem to froth up and do nothing to suppress.
The less charitable side is that local bosses want to remain bosses and see social media criticism as eroding their power, and I suspect that this is the deeper impulse.
It probably also comes down to local bosses and their cronies want a deeper cut of the profit
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Rights and responsibility are irrelevant to them (so are political borders, by the way, aside from tax evasion purposes). When they are given the power, they are going to use it.
I have tried to tell people that you can't separate government from corporate. This should do a little to confirm it.
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Re "separate government from corporate"... EU nations like France, Germany do it all the time.
Ireland likes to go full gov on US brands too.
Telco, crypto and content laws in Australia, New Zealand?
Support for the needs of the GCHQ in the UK? NSA in the USA?
"The world is a business" [americanrhetoric.com]
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Whole name "Pakistan" is based on intolerance,
Nevermind the name. The country exists because of religious intolerance.
But it is hardly the first or last time a country was split along religious and tribal lines.
Isn't that how it should be? (Score:2)
Aren't half of the world's wars caused by colonialists not paying attention to cultural, tribal and religious separations when drawing their arbitrary borders?
Of course I agree that Pakistan only exists because of intolerance, pushed into the otherwise very culturally tolerant and diverse Indians, by (obviously Abrahamic) religious nutjobs.
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Aren't half of the world's wars caused by colonialists not paying attention to cultural, tribal and religious separations when drawing their arbitrary borders?
I think that statement serves only to point blame where the speakers ideological preferences lie.
Empires generally bring peace, but when they collapse or withdraw, can leave a power vacuum, and the seeds for war.
The British did a much better job of handing over power than any other empire I can think of, e.g. the Ottoman Turks in the middle east.
At least they felt some responsibility, unlike say the Portuguese who just fled.
Could they have done an even better job? Of course. But often it is just impossible
Pakistan means "land of the pure" (Score:3)
> Whole name "Pakistan" is based on intolerance, it implies that Indians who decided to not to become muslims are impure.
I wondered about that, so I decided to look it up [wikipedia.org]:
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Pakistan is the land where a convicted and executed murderer has become a folk hero (precisely for the murder he committed), with huge crowds visiting his shrine. Perhaps the Pakistani government isn't wrong when it wants to curb the online freedom of speech for Pakistanis.
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Using the pejorative "Paky" makes you seem as though you recently retired from 6th grade. Shouldn't your mother be monitoring your internet habits more closely?
And nothing of value was lost /s (Score:1)
n/t
Sure, now they say that (Score:2)
Sure, now they say that. Let's see how long that lasts.
Distraction (Score:3, Insightful)
Hey look at how these big powerful American companies are looking out for free speech in other parts of the world (meanwhile Pence's first move as Coronavirus Czar is to prevent helath officials making statements to the press without going through him).
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Pence's first move as Coronavirus Czar is to prevent helath officials making statements to the press without going through him.
It just depends on whether you attribute Pence et. al with good or bad intentions.
The panic can be worse that the disease. Having sensational click-baiting health "officials" spouting half truths and scaring everyone isn't a good thing. OTOH, if they are using that to silence facts that's not good either.
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At least Pence is an adult.
Delusional, but an adult.
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Doesn't trust himself alone in a room with a member of the other sex, but totally not a hormonal teenager.
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Hey look at how these big powerful American companies are looking out for free speech in other parts of the world (meanwhile Pence's first move as Coronavirus Czar is to prevent helath officials making statements to the press without going through him).
When the head of the CDC is the wife of the guy that spent 3 years trying to destroy your boss and covering for the crimes of the DOJ and FBI and you're the head of the task force over seeing the emergency response, yes everything should fucking go through you first. Nice job exposing yourself as the partisan hack you are.
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Errr...the head of the CDC is male and last we heard, he wasn't the wife of anyone. If by crimes you mean the DoJ and the FBI investigating the national security implications of the orange pasty being Putin's poodle, I think these are only crimes in the heads of people who think any adult supervision of the orange pasty is traitorous.
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Yeah ... everyone else is the partisan hack. Have you read your own writings lately?
If only they rebelled against their own censorship (Score:1)
That's Rich! (Score:1)
So Google (YouTube) is sued because they are censoring videos that should be available for anyone to view but because it does NOT support their political views they delete them. Now a country wants to sensor Google they fight back. What hypocrites. You can't have it both ways!!
Re: That's Rich! (Score:1)
"You can't have it both ways!!"
That really depends on how many suitcases full of cash you "donate" to judges, regulators, and politicians.
But not China's (Score:2)
Because, you know, Pakistan is a much bigger threat to freedom than the largest fascist state in history. Also, China pays more.
"darkness" (Score:3)
... and threatened to leave the country and its 70 million internet users in digital darkness.
I think that the internet is a surprising sunny place without the commercial privacy predators. I don't like internet censorship one bit, but an internet without google, facebook and twitter can only get brighter.
Not exactly a threat now is it? (Score:2)
"Oh noes! Facebook Google and Twitter leave us? How saaad. ... :D ... I guess it',s byebye then ... *glues on and wipes off fake hot-melt glue tear*"
I guess now they will be left with just one overbearing totalitarian data kraken. Not four. ^^