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It struck me as I was reading this, the entire reason this is even a possible thing is the advent of the "App Store" If users obtained thier software elsewhere
by matheweis 10y ago
It struck me as I was reading this, the entire reason this is even a possible thing is the advent of the "App Store"
If users obtained thier software elsewhere, the system could still "ban" it, but people would still obtain it.
With the app stores, it becomes fairly easy for a government to unilaterally ban a piece of software.
- umeshunni 10y agoThey could still obtain it, but the government could still mandate that local ISPs and telcos block connectivity to it. This is like what they do when they ban websites.
- matt_wulfeck 10y agoThey do ISP-level DNS banning, like what happened with Twitter. Sometimes we can't engineer ourselves out of a problem and need to do it democratically. Looks like this government is a little rotten if you ask me.
- DroidX86 10y agoThe petition was brought forth by an RTI (Right to Information) "Activist" and Web Dev who works on security for private companies. It has nothing to do with the government.
- kuschku 10y agoThey couldn’t if users used a federated protocol. You can spin up XMPP servers faster than they can block them.
- capote 10y agoCouldn't the government ban the company from making the service available? The app depends on the service.
- JoshTriplett 10y agoThe company isn't in their jurisdiction. At most, they could try to block it, like Brazil did.
- capote 10y agoOh! I didn't realize it worked that way. So they can tell Apple to take something off their App Store because Apple has presence in their country? Would app stores be immune if their company doesn't have a presence in a country?
- ultramancool 10y agoApp stores may not be legally required to take it down as they're outside the jurisdiction... but a threat to block the app store entirely in the country is probably enough to get them to budge.
- capote 10y agoBlocking an entire app store is so consumer-unfriendly--is there a chance of that happening in a reasonable country?
- dingo_bat 10y agoNot happening in India. To be realistic, even such a thing as a Whatsapp "ban" isn't going to happen/work. It will be at most similar to how porn is "banned". My ISP returns DNS not resolved for most porn websites if you use their resolver, but they pushed an update to the router changing the DNS to 8.8.8.8. The final result is most people haven't even realized that porn websites are banned.
- hashhar 10y agoPorn is effectively not banned because even the NIC DNS servers (the one's one whose infrastructure the government runs on) resolve them really fine for me.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]