India set to adopt China-style internet censorship

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/14/india-adopts-china-style-inter.html

New rules limiting internet freedom could be imposed by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government any time after Thursday night.

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I thought India was a democracy?

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It is; sadly, it’s a democracy where a bunch of racist proto-Fascists have been voted into power.

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Google News seems to blacklist most alternate media but it includes

This surprises me because India is so heterogeneous. It must be like getting Americans to agree on which stuff is the bad stuff on the internet - everybody hates something different.

I suspect that that’s part of the incentive: Modi’s merry band of it-would-be-impolite-to-call-us-dangerous-ethnic-nationalists-with-nontrivial-theocratic-enthusiasm presumably found it harder to assemble the clout needed for this initiative because support for them is hardly unanimous; but high levels of unsupport are exactly what you build a quality repressive apparatus for.

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Unfortunately this will likely become a global trend.

So? European countries are mostly democracies, so is Australia, and their governments have been making very similar rules to these. They just tend to be reported more sympathetically.

The fact that this, and similar European rules, all seem to be centered on big internet companies shows that we need to go back to a more decentralized Internet, so there’s no central point of contact for governments to go to with censorship requests.

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