India moving towards Chinese model on internet control, says Cloudflare CEO | Hacker News Reader

India moving towards Chinese model on internet control, says Cloudflare CEO

theweek.in

23 pointswebmobdev10 comments

This is an incredibly ironic headline, given that Cloudflare’s raison d'être is to expand its own overlay network on top of the Internet. By this point it must be more than 10% of Internet traffic going through Cloudflare hardware.

I love Cloudflare, but this is not a fight where they’re defending the moral high ground.

(Granted, they didn’t write the headline.)

I hate CloudFlare - I use a browser with a lot of privacy add-ons, and sometimes with VPN, and some CloudFlare powered sites trap me in their Captcha hell making me solve 3 to 10 of them each time! Now a days, I just don't bother with such sites and immediately try to find a cached version of the site instead.

As an indian, I have very mixed feelings on this:

- Narendra Modi, the current Prime Minister of India belongs to a right-wing political organisation. Sharing a chummy relationship with Trump (for whom he even personally campaigned on American soil in the last election), the American social media networks (FaceBook, WhatsApp and Twitter) during the Trump rule favoured Modi a lot. They helped him by interfering in indian elections (by suppressing opposition social media campaigns and advertisements on the network) and helped him spread his right-wing, often hate-filled message without repercussions.

Source:

(1) Facebook Executive Supported India’s Modi, Disparaged Opposition in Internal Messages - https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-executive-supported-in...

- After Trump lost the recent presidential election, the American social networks, like any other mainstream media, now largely kow-tow to the Biden administration and Modi has lost much of his political leverage over them. This has resulted in them being forced to be more politically "neutral" and give space to the opposition voice in India on these networks.

Source:

(1) Facebook’s Top Public Policy Executive in India Steps Down - https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-s-top-public-policy-ex... ,

(2) Government asks Twitter to remove ‘manipulated media’ tag fom tweets related to ‘Congress toolkit’ - https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/government-asks-twitt...

- The Modi government in return has tried to counter this with a slew of regulations / legislation against the social media networks to regain political leverage and bully them. And like Trump supporters did, they have also attempted to migrate to another social media platform under their control.

Source:

(1) Social media companies will have to track 'first originator' of information under certain circumstances, while digital media and OTT platforms will have to resolve grievances pertaining to a 'Code of Ethics - https://thewire.in/government/modi-govt-announces-new-rules-... ,

(2) Govt announces new social media rules to curb its misuse - https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/govt-announces-new-so... ,

(3) As Twitter seeks talks, Ministers move to Indian-made app Koo - https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/amid-row-with-twitter...

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What ever be your indian political ideology, the dilemma should be clear for any indian - why should India rely on the presence of a liberal government in the USA for American social media networks to be politically neutral and liberal in India?

National Herald India is a newspaper published by India's oldest political party, the Indian National Congress, that led India's freedom movement, and there is an interesting opinion piece published on it: "India now a digital colony: Is Facebook the new East India Company?" - https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/opinion/india-now-a-digi... ... - I mention this because let's not be under the illusion that only a right-wing government wants to control the internet. There are genuine and valid reasons in a democracy to have the internet regulated in any democratic country as long as liberal and democratic values prevail. (Ofcourse, it is a slippery slope ...).

Social media - whether it’s American or not is a cancer of the modern world. “Connecting people” - yes, connecting people and shoving them into echo chambers of left wing and right wing.

The uprising should come from the bottom, not from the top. The new generation needs to revolt against organizing political factions on the internet. Get together in person and canvas for your party. It used to be that extreme voices would have to go through the low pass filter of gathering support in your town, rallying for awareness and creating a movement. It was hard work and often not successful.

Now, any lunatic on Twitter can bypass the scrutiny of the public and blast a message through a ripple of cascading retweets. The more extreme, the better it appears. Vocal minority rules.

Big Tech needs to be regulated so it cannot shutdown conservative voices (now) and liberal voices (future). They’ll do anything to increase ad revenue at the expense of ripping the social fabric apart.

Very well put - personally, even I have realised the need to fight the attraction towards the "echo chambers" that I am very attracted to on these platforms. Long term, they do tend to have debilitating effect on our psyche. Sociologists / psychologists urgently need to identify the signs of such addiction (so that regulations can be introduced to limit it) and also come up with some kind of "detoxification" therapy to help those already hooked on to such platforms. And yes, private corporations should not get to dictate speech on the internet or any other medium.

Can you give examples of right wing or hate filled agenda of Modi? I see this Modi hate come up reflexively every time India is mentioned anywhere on HN.

A more appropriate platform for your question and umpteen sources for it is https://reddit.com/r/india/ - Political discussions are discouraged on HN unless very relevant / related to tech or business policies.

I am unsure how my comment is political while yours was not. But I see this double standard as a symptom of the same bias on HN.

National Herald is no sacred newspaper - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Herald_corruption_c...

And what does a politically motivated case have to do with the topic we are discussing here?

The pertinent point I was making was that a newspaper associated with the freedom movement in India, against colonisation and imperialism, is drawing the same parallel with today's digital economy and comparing it with the imperialism that they fought against in the past.

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