Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

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I just clicked around online, but it appears that they've been targeting Google for a while now, seemingly after they refused to comply with surveillance requests from the rest of the government:

> In 2014, CCI imposed a fine of ₹10 million upon Google for failure to comply with the directions given by the Director General seeking information and documents. [0]

4 years later they sued them for some unexplained "search bias" and then 3 years after that, they're back for some sort of market-dependent anti-trust case. I think there's plenty of skeletons in Google's closet, but this is not one of them. If I had to guess, this is the reaction of a frustrated conservative regime discovering that "big tech" doesn't really kowtow to any and all government requests. Following the pushback from the farmer's protest censorship, I'd imagine they're pretty pissed at Google, Facebook and Twitter.

[0] https://pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=104701

Just wanted to clarify that the first one from 2014 was under a different ruling party than the current one as the date is 27th March 2014.

I don't like attempts made at censoring information either, but lumping these together doesn't come off as honest.

That's true, I'm not so sure on the subject myself which is why I prefaced it with 'if I had to guess'. In any case, it's still a worrying pattern of behavior for a country with so many people in it.

> frustrated conservative regime

On 27th March 2014 (the date of the press release you linked to), the Congress-led UPA was in power.

I know Hinduphobia is very fashionable within the "smart" set, but they should spend some time meditating on their biases before constructing arguments that have no basis in fact.

Also note how they drop the farmers’ protests without any context. “Modi is punishing Google because people are searching for the protests”

Indeed, truly an evil conflation to make when the Indian government threatened to jail domestic Twitter and Facebook employees.

> Indian government threatened to jail domestic Twitter and Facebook employees.

Only if they continued to violate the law. Anyway, the matter is now in the courts along with tens of millions of other cases and I am sure it will be resolved by the end of the current decade.

Then why not threaten to do the same for Google?

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