> the app enables communication even during network restrictions and creates a substantial risk of misuse by anti-national elements, terrorist organisations, organised criminal groups and cyber criminals seeking to evade lawful detection and continue communication despite legally imposed restrictions.
This mouthful boils down to exactly this: a form of communication not controlled by the government creates a risk for the country.
Sorry for pointing out the obvious, but if your country's safety depends on ability to block all forms of private person to person messages, your government has failed in one of its primary goals: providing safety for its citizens. They can blame Dorsey, Telegram, WhatsApp and what not, but it is their failure. Things will not change until people notice the obvious and vote out incompetent persons in power.
>This mouthful boils down to exactly this: a form of communication not controlled by the government creates a risk for the government.
Fixed that for you. It's a subtle but important difference.
There is only partial overlap between what's good for the government and the country. At some times in some countries the overlap may be substantial, or it may be scant if at all.
Those "protections" are in place for the protection of the government, not the citizens. That's also why the US tried to classify encryption as arms and why they passed the gun control act (people nowadays might think modern gun control was passed to help school kids, no lmao, it was passed in response to the killing of JFK).
I don't have the citations to back this up anymore than you did, but it was also passed because of the rise in Black Power movements walking around with guns.
I used to be an obnoxious gun control advocate until I learned that California's gun control legislation was brought about in response to the Black Panther's patrolling predominantly black neighborhoods while armed to protect the people of the neighborhood from state sponsored (police) violence.
>I don't have the citations to back this up anymore than you did, but it was also passed because of the rise in Black Power movements walking around with guns.
Were they what precipitated it or were they one of the many factors used to get the public on board?
I don’t think anyone thinks gun control was passed to help school kids. People have been begging the govt to pass stricter gun control laws to protect kids for decades with very little success.
Blocking communications is basically sweeping the issue under the rug in the hopes that it dissolves on its own. This is closer to avoiding of "taking action"
I mean one could say they are taking action when they lock up and kill random immigrants... or getting into unnecessary wars in the middle east. I would hardly call that a measure of competence. In fact, I would love a government that did absolutely nothing at all ahead of this one.
India is pretty serious about being able to monitor all communications after the terror attacks in Mumbai in 2008. The terrorists used satellite phones to coordinate the attack. As a result, they banned most satellite communication devices.
I learned about this earlier this year because I had a connecting flight through India on the way to go trekking in the Himalayas. I had planned to take a Garmin inReach with me, but luckily a day or two before my flight out I came across horror stories of people getting pulled out of security and taken to JAIL in India for having these things in their checked bags when TRANSITING India. Security there when transiting from Switzerland to Nepal was no joke - every single electronic item including anything with wires had to come out of bags including electric toothbrush.
In light of that, banning point to point communication seems on brand for India. Note that Apple gets a pass for its satellite capable phones by geofencing India and disabling the feature.
It’s funny because the Indian independence movement was literally a failure. Indians protested non-violently and sometimes violently for over a hundred years, and British control (first through the East India company and then directly by the crown) kept increasing with every passing year, eventually encompassing the entire subcontinent.
India eventually gained independence because colonialism in general was not politically and economically viable in a post WW2 world, and so Britain just got up and left (as they did from dozens of other colonies in the post war years)
Had the independence movement not existed and Gandhi himself not existed the end result would have been exactly the same.
I think the political non-viability was at least partly due to the combination of non-violence and the potential threat of violence, as I am of the opinion that the first never works without a threat of the second.
The USA is already on my blacklist of places never to go visit as a tourist again because you never know if they will send you to some prison in some nasty country.
Not exactly. There have been cases where tourists were denied entry and faced extended detention but they were held in U.S. facilities before being returned to their home countries.
There have been cases of incoming immigrants sent to foreign prisons without charges or trial. In March 2025 the U.S. administration flew 238 Venezuelan migrants from Texas directly to the "Terrorism Confinement Center" in El Salvador. The group included asylum seekers with active court cases, individuals who had entered the U.S. legally, and recent border crossers. The administration labeled them members of the "Tren de Aragua" gang to justify the move.
Ages ago there was a Russian citizen they wanted who was flying to the Caribbean. His flight had a surprise landing in Florida with the FBI waiting on the tarmac.
No, I don't think so. There's a set of people who consume media that deliberately and consistently conflates "immigrant" and "illegal immigrant", and they just can't disambiguate what happens to one from what happens to the other.
Over the years a bunch of biathlon competitors have had various flavors of a bad time in NYC despite complying with the federal level stuff they're supposed to and that the state NY is supposed to honor. IDK if any of them have gone to actual jail for very long though.
I'm aware of stories of people who've had their flights unexpectedly grounded in New York (, New York) so they just abandoned their checked pistol and refused to collect it. I'd imagine something similar. If you never take possession, it becomes harder to charge and convict someone for possession.
When you're standing at the customs office entering a country, your lawyers are far far FAR away and the people talking to you won't care about them even a little bit.
Whatever will happen with you lawyering and fighting the border officers, will happen after you've been detained.
In the late 90s I attended a Telephone industry conference while working for a telephony test equipment company. A rep. from the Indian government gave a talk on their telephone system regulations. During the question period I got up and asked how India was dealing with voice over internet protocol (VOIP). With a straight face the speaker replied "We will not allow it". :-)
And it's also cute when people imply the internet is unregulateable. There are plenty of tools that countries use to regulate internet traffic. They can require ISPs to DPI the traffic and block it. They can MITM traffic. They can shut off the internet entirely. They can throw people in jail. etc.
This stuff happens in many places, including in India.
>And it's also cute when people imply the internet is unregulateable. There are plenty of tools that countries use to regulate internet traffic. They can require ISPs to DPI the traffic and block it. They can MITM traffic. They can shut off the internet entirely. They can throw people in jail. etc.
I don't think there's any country that can keep a lid on the internet. The best they can do are leaky blocks (china's gfw is probably the best in the world, but still quite leaky), or complete shutdowns (eg. iran).
As I understand it, China's GFW is intentionally leaky, balancing as much control as they can get away with but not enough to forment open revolt. As with a lot of things, the best control is not total control.
They could even just shoot people for using the internet! It’s hopeless. Anyone who wants freedom should probably just give up now before it’s too late.
There are workarounds for all of those things up until the point of you suffering violence for just using any encryption. But if you are at that point, then your country is completely fucked.
It is trivial for a law to simply ban workarounds. The vast majority of countries can and do censor the internet in some ways, and they all use violence to compel compliance with it. The only thing that varies is the extent to which it is censored.
Or fly a plane or drone overhead and see [0] where the terminals are. After a few fines most people would decide it’s not worth the risk.
I remember how the Uber rollout worked in Berlin. Uber said they don’t need to comply with anything the city asked for and enjoyed their position in the safety of an ocean away so the local authorities instituted eye watering fines for drivers caught providing Uber rides. Uber decided to comply.
Depends on how many terminals there are and whether or not the neighborhoods they are in are sympathetic to the operators. It’s very easy to move them.
I can see how that worked in Berlin. In USA or someplace with a healthier culture of resistance that would fail laughably. Americans will drive with no license, registration, in cars they've stolen back from the repo man because they refuse to pay anything to anyone. When my car was totalled by an illegal alien, the police didn't even show up, wisely because they were surely driving without license, identity documents, insurance, registration, or any sort of recoverable assets or any way to punish them but to throw them in an overflowing jail. You could try fining them but it would be like trying to draw blood from a stone. I suppose could try to jail them, but you'd find our jails are already full, and we already let violent criminals out on bail.
In much of the world including USA poor people will slang crack for $5 under threat of life in jail and fines higher than they could ever hope to pay. Suffice to say there's an endless line of people willing to uber for roughly crack slinging wages without the risk of life imprisonment even if the fines are as bad -- because their alternatives are worse.
Putting aside the geopolitics of satellite destruction, we're likely moving to the realm of microwave based disablement instead of kinetic. It's the thing that can scale and provide some plausible deniability while the numbers are low.
Lots of countries ban voip in some way or another. Not allowed to connect to the PSTN. Disrupted by licensed ISPs based on traffic inspection. Large vendors yelled at. Etc.
isn't phone tech itself digital over the internet nowadays just like VOIP if it isn't using VOIP directly?
on the other phone calls are getting replaced by video chat with the various messengers, making VOIP a dying technology, at least the part that end users access directly.
Yes, but PSTN using voip is paying all the telecom fees and taxes and respecting the government surveillance mandates which is what the Indian Government is concerned about.
> on the other phone calls are getting replaced by video chat with the various messengers, making VOIP a dying technology, at least the part that end users access directly.
Not so much in countries where it's banned and the ban is enforced.
If Modi government wants to ban something, it is usually good stuff.
> “The application’s design, which enables communication even during network restrictions, creates a substantial risk of misuse by anti-national elements, terrorist organisations, organised criminal groups, and cybercriminals seeking to evade lawful detection and continue communication despite legally imposed restrictions,” the notice mentioned.
Literally any encrypted mesh net communication protocol would be subject to the same propaganda. The point of this stuff is providing checks and balances for the people against a rogue government, or emergency situation.
Yeah, did you know criminals can use roads to commit crimes, too? We should destroy all of the roads. Terrorists also use food to give them energy to commit more terrorism, so we should start regulating access to food behind mandatory ID checks.
Yes, exactly that. Tons of crime is committed using only in-person communication. Should we all have microphones in our homes? Do detective work, flip sources, follow the money.
I believe that most of terrorism does happen because the people behind it have some goals, not for funsies; so trying to fight the causes would be one thing to do. Obviously, that's difficult for many reasons, and making life more shit for everyone else is cheap and easy, and hence preferred.
But if the cause is "death to the West" or "from the river to the sea" or "India should not be secular" then it's a bit of a problem. How do you fight the cause?
> Honestly no idea what I’d do if I were in government.
It's not ordinary citizens' job to figure out solutions to these problems. Government has teams of intelligence agencies to answer these questions. Encrypted chat is fundamental infra that shouldn't be blocked.
If you were sane, you would realise that restricting the right of billions of people to communicate privately, a right they have enjoyed for all the thousands of years of human history, is handing terrorists a complete and total victory far beyond any act of violence they could commit. The purpose of a government is not to prevent 100% of all crime and terrorism by locking every citizen in a straitjacket.
this also isn't even motivated by terrorists, but rather people daring to oppose the government.
Title should specify that it is Indian government. I was worried for a second there that it was the American government. I should have read the url though.
I was fully expecting that was about Trump administration, and was a bit disappointed that my prediction turned out to be wrong. I do not support this; I expected the first federal court and then all the appeals to serve a verdict cementing the right of encrypted communication to exist in the US.
Be careful what you wish for. Bringing a test case to the current supreme court is playing with fire, and we are far more likely to end up with precedent rejecting a right to encrypted communications, given the current make up of the court. They have already shown a willingness to show deference to national security, and our fifth amendment protections are already eroding (State v. Andrews in NJ, government can compel the production of a password under the foregone conclusion exception). For now this is still state dependent, but its only a matter of time before a case reaches the supreme court.
We're much safer not opening that can of worms for now.
Something like this would be basically impossible in the US, and it wouldn't even matter what kind of administration tried it. The US government doesn't even order ISPs to block websites because they run afoul of all kinds of 1st amendment litigation. They just have the FBI seize a domain after a court order.
Honestly I would think something like this would come from the EU or UK. UK is trying to ban VPNs, EU is trying to ban private chat completely. EU countries routinely block whole swaths of IPs and websites, etc.
Oh boy , this is American exceptionalism at its finest. The US has by far the most authoritarian government of all mentioned entities.
Really you should protest against your government.
Yes, it is American exceptionalism (and quite foolish) to make the claim that "This could never happen in the US".
No, the American government is NOT more authoritative than the UK in the way they handle freedom of websites. The grandparent comment is correct: the US government does not (currently) order ISPs to block specific websites.
Yes, those in the US should protest the current government (many of us already are doing so).
Sorry OPs first sentence mentions this is basically impossible in the US and then compared to EU or UK. There is a certain tone and I don't think this comment was a good faith criticism on EU or UK policy
How many people has the US sent to jail due to saying naughty things on Twitter vs the UK? If were going to speak of authoritarianism. Just due to ensuring free speech and right to bear arms the US is possibly the least authoritarian developed nation outside of maybe Switzerland.
Bluetooth based messaging apps are naturally able to circumvent internet restrictions that inhibit protests, citizen journalism and other kinds of unapproved activities but there are several ways Bluetooth could be updated as a protocol to introduce compatibility with some kind of antibody-esque suppression of communication standard.
It's just a matter of interested parties setting up a body to create the standard, which might genuinely be a huge bottleneck under the current geopolitical landscape.
I was thinking the same thing. We do need more. I set up a Meshtastic node at the house and joined https://chicagolandmesh.org/ which has been a fantastic community for beginners in mesh based comms.
No, not doing nothing. They are probably funding it, like Tor, as this kind of technology is useful in intelligence and the promotion and sustainment of foreign resistance movements.
(For once my tax dollars are producing something I appreciate, even if I don’t love the reason behind it.)
Unfortunately Bitchat feels like an unfinished proof of concept.
At a festival I got notifications there are "other users nearby", which made me question if and how the app is broadcasting it's presence, possibly at all times. I also couldn't figure out a way to turn off these notifications (there's barely any settings) and I ended up uninstalling the app.
Some relevant wisdom from the founding fathers of the United States:
When asked about when kind of government the founding fathers had created, Ben Franklin replied "A Republic, if you can keep it."
On democracy, John Adams wrote: "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
Thomas Jefferson further wrote that "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
tl;dr democracies need to be fought for, or else they won't stay democracies forever.
John Adams wrote that as a reason why the United States is not a democracy. It's a Constitutional Republic. It's a consistent theme throughout the Federalist Papers.
Individual States and localities have elements of democracy, but the US—built upon knowledge of Rome—is not.
The United States of America is the second iteration of American government, after the one that failed in 1787. The arguments leading up to the 1789 Constitution are quite explicit around why democracies don't work. America is a nation of nations, which is why "these United States" as a plural term was used frequently until after the Civil War, when having it be a singular concept once-and-for-all was of paramount importance.
That said, this is ban is clearly a restriction on freedom of expression, and highly un-American.
Indian government also blocked Telegram a while back to prevent exam leaks and stopped Whatsapp's rollout of usernames (which has some legitimate concerns) but more or less it wants complete China-like control of it's citizens' communications. Except no one uses any homegrown chat app (for good reasons)
Agree, sounds like it is working for its intended purposes.
The thing about it is they specifically are targeting the repo which is interesting because the only thing that can really stop the proliferation of these apps is not allowing user to install from other sources which would have to come from Google preventing this.
Hopefully google won't prevent people from installing from outside sources /s
This change is largely drivin by claims that installing apps from other sources is insecure... I'd argue this is why it's insecure... Not insecure for individuals.
Insecure for oppressive governments.
I sincerely hope that Microsoft responds with "If the Indian government wants to block content hosted on U.S. servers, they are more than welcome to set up their own Great Firewall."
Ban Post-It notes and any other piece of paper than can be passed around with messages written on them by bad people. No whispering into people ears either unless your lips are plainly readable.
This may not be much, but if you’re outside India, please write to your local representatives and also to the Indian government that you are going to avoid products made in India as much as possible, will avoid visiting the country for tourism or work, and will not invest in the Indian markets or in foreign currency bank deposits. Clearly state the reasons why, and ask how the “largest democracy in the world” could be so short sighted and dictatorial.
Note that India is heavily dependent on money from elsewhere (hence a lot of recent policy changes to bring in more foreign money). It is a net importer and isn’t strong enough on exports.
There are some recent policy changes to attract more foreign currency deposits with lots of expectations.
If there is a hint that these subversive actions are also going to hurt the economy, there is a tiny, tiny sliver of a chance that the powers that be will be a bit more afraid of losing the next round of elections in the state governments and in a few years at the union level. That could possibly limit the ignorant knee jerk reactions and bans.
For context, there are currently mass protests against the Indian government which the government is violently suppressing. It also just cut off the internet in a major city to stop the protesters communicating, so this ban is probably to try and suppress other means of communication.
Well, this also shows why we all should remove our dependency on Microsoft-GitHub in the long run. The US government just fiddle-influences too much here. Tomorrow it could be your project too.
We evaluated Bitchat and determined it would be a really useful tool for Gaza - Israel controls all internet access to Palestine and would frequently cut off internet access to Gazans. We tried building our own but when Bitchat came out we focused on that instead.
To imagine that US MNCs readily obey these orders. There was a time when Gmail exited China due to Aurora attacks, and Chinese GFW is universally hated, so why is India allowed to create a GFW like censorship on US platforms? Indian courts have even blocked Reuters articles GLOBALLY before. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/19/india-judg...
Bitchat, berty, briar, all do use Bluetooth for communication. It would be funny if popular apps also add p2p Bluetooth options or just over any network, and seeing them trying to ban the internet.
#2 post on HN currently is: India’s first privately developed rocket reaches orbit on dramatic debut launch. In the same page, there is this news about banning an OSS app, built on open tech. Just saying.
Aside of if it's right or not (i actually think it is), the bag is out in the open, anyone any countries, any bad person or security persons are going to look at it now
This mouthful boils down to exactly this: a form of communication not controlled by the government creates a risk for the country.
Sorry for pointing out the obvious, but if your country's safety depends on ability to block all forms of private person to person messages, your government has failed in one of its primary goals: providing safety for its citizens. They can blame Dorsey, Telegram, WhatsApp and what not, but it is their failure. Things will not change until people notice the obvious and vote out incompetent persons in power.
Fixed that for you. It's a subtle but important difference.
There is only partial overlap between what's good for the government and the country. At some times in some countries the overlap may be substantial, or it may be scant if at all.
I used to be an obnoxious gun control advocate until I learned that California's gun control legislation was brought about in response to the Black Panther's patrolling predominantly black neighborhoods while armed to protect the people of the neighborhood from state sponsored (police) violence.
Reference to start from: https://www.kcra.com/article/liberty-limits-black-panther-pa...
This topic is full of subtlty so recommend reading the sources from that article and so on.
Were they what precipitated it or were they one of the many factors used to get the public on board?
9/11 didn't write the patriot act.
I'm fairly sure whatever they do you'd likely be complaining about it. Glad to be wrong though.
They're afraid of people communicating. That's not a safety thing.
I learned about this earlier this year because I had a connecting flight through India on the way to go trekking in the Himalayas. I had planned to take a Garmin inReach with me, but luckily a day or two before my flight out I came across horror stories of people getting pulled out of security and taken to JAIL in India for having these things in their checked bags when TRANSITING India. Security there when transiting from Switzerland to Nepal was no joke - every single electronic item including anything with wires had to come out of bags including electric toothbrush.
In light of that, banning point to point communication seems on brand for India. Note that Apple gets a pass for its satellite capable phones by geofencing India and disabling the feature.
on edit: changed myths to narratives to avoid confusion
India eventually gained independence because colonialism in general was not politically and economically viable in a post WW2 world, and so Britain just got up and left (as they did from dozens of other colonies in the post war years)
Had the independence movement not existed and Gandhi himself not existed the end result would have been exactly the same.
BBC says 3000 but yeah.
https://www.outlookindia.com/national/2-terrorists-family-ho...
So the houses of 2 accused were razed because.....
I make additional effort to never experience that again. Connecting flight through Mumbai. An absolutely awful experience.
Now India is on the same blacklist.
There have been cases of incoming immigrants sent to foreign prisons without charges or trial. In March 2025 the U.S. administration flew 238 Venezuelan migrants from Texas directly to the "Terrorism Confinement Center" in El Salvador. The group included asylum seekers with active court cases, individuals who had entered the U.S. legally, and recent border crossers. The administration labeled them members of the "Tren de Aragua" gang to justify the move.
Search “parks and recs straight to jail”
Whatever will happen with you lawyering and fighting the border officers, will happen after you've been detained.
In the late 90s I attended a Telephone industry conference while working for a telephony test equipment company. A rep. from the Indian government gave a talk on their telephone system regulations. During the question period I got up and asked how India was dealing with voice over internet protocol (VOIP). With a straight face the speaker replied "We will not allow it". :-)
This stuff happens in many places, including in India.
I don't think there's any country that can keep a lid on the internet. The best they can do are leaky blocks (china's gfw is probably the best in the world, but still quite leaky), or complete shutdowns (eg. iran).
When someone with the monopoly on the use of force says they will not allow something, that isn't something cute to ignore, it is serious.
I remember how the Uber rollout worked in Berlin. Uber said they don’t need to comply with anything the city asked for and enjoyed their position in the safety of an ocean away so the local authorities instituted eye watering fines for drivers caught providing Uber rides. Uber decided to comply.
[0] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/quadrf-can-spot-drone...
Resistance against totalitarianism is a duty.
In much of the world including USA poor people will slang crack for $5 under threat of life in jail and fines higher than they could ever hope to pay. Suffice to say there's an endless line of people willing to uber for roughly crack slinging wages without the risk of life imprisonment even if the fines are as bad -- because their alternatives are worse.
on the other phone calls are getting replaced by video chat with the various messengers, making VOIP a dying technology, at least the part that end users access directly.
> on the other phone calls are getting replaced by video chat with the various messengers, making VOIP a dying technology, at least the part that end users access directly.
Not so much in countries where it's banned and the ban is enforced.
> “The application’s design, which enables communication even during network restrictions, creates a substantial risk of misuse by anti-national elements, terrorist organisations, organised criminal groups, and cybercriminals seeking to evade lawful detection and continue communication despite legally imposed restrictions,” the notice mentioned.
Yeah, did you know criminals can use roads to commit crimes, too? We should destroy all of the roads. Terrorists also use food to give them energy to commit more terrorism, so we should start regulating access to food behind mandatory ID checks.
Originally you’d communicate by mail and they could get a warrant. The day encrypted comms showed up, they wouldn’t just want to give up.
If you love the encryption but hate the terrorism, what to do? Double down on old school / physical surveillance? (Obviously not my field)
That was why the government decided to ban mail, and since that didn't cover all cases, they also banned people handing things to each other.
At least, I think that is how I remember it going in an alternate world where physical laws mimiced electronic laws.
It's not ordinary citizens' job to figure out solutions to these problems. Government has teams of intelligence agencies to answer these questions. Encrypted chat is fundamental infra that shouldn't be blocked.
this also isn't even motivated by terrorists, but rather people daring to oppose the government.
It is generally extremist arms interested in destabilizing India to strengthen other regional powers (usually Pakistan).
The goal of much of these terrorist attacks simply end with ... no India, not "we demand change to policies in a reasonable way"
Spending crazy amounts in public education, healthcare, and nuclear arsenal?
We also regulate roads. You can not drive around in tanks. Or without license plate...
We're much safer not opening that can of worms for now.
Honestly I would think something like this would come from the EU or UK. UK is trying to ban VPNs, EU is trying to ban private chat completely. EU countries routinely block whole swaths of IPs and websites, etc.
'This is the right call' — VPN industry praises the UK’s decisions to leave VPN alone | TechRadar https://share.google/CyBImh95bt3VTubJV
Yes, it is American exceptionalism (and quite foolish) to make the claim that "This could never happen in the US".
No, the American government is NOT more authoritative than the UK in the way they handle freedom of websites. The grandparent comment is correct: the US government does not (currently) order ISPs to block specific websites.
Yes, those in the US should protest the current government (many of us already are doing so).
Midterms are coming up and the regime has spoken openly about "rigging" them so... just give it some time (and download a copy!).
It's just a matter of interested parties setting up a body to create the standard, which might genuinely be a huge bottleneck under the current geopolitical landscape.
(For once my tax dollars are producing something I appreciate, even if I don’t love the reason behind it.)
At a festival I got notifications there are "other users nearby", which made me question if and how the app is broadcasting it's presence, possibly at all times. I also couldn't figure out a way to turn off these notifications (there's barely any settings) and I ended up uninstalling the app.
When asked about when kind of government the founding fathers had created, Ben Franklin replied "A Republic, if you can keep it."
On democracy, John Adams wrote: "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
Thomas Jefferson further wrote that "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
tl;dr democracies need to be fought for, or else they won't stay democracies forever.
Individual States and localities have elements of democracy, but the US—built upon knowledge of Rome—is not.
The United States of America is the second iteration of American government, after the one that failed in 1787. The arguments leading up to the 1789 Constitution are quite explicit around why democracies don't work. America is a nation of nations, which is why "these United States" as a plural term was used frequently until after the Civil War, when having it be a singular concept once-and-for-all was of paramount importance.
That said, this is ban is clearly a restriction on freedom of expression, and highly un-American.
Aside: oof yeah this seems like terrible policy and takes India off my bucket list.
The thing about it is they specifically are targeting the repo which is interesting because the only thing that can really stop the proliferation of these apps is not allowing user to install from other sources which would have to come from Google preventing this.
Hopefully google won't prevent people from installing from outside sources /s
This change is largely drivin by claims that installing apps from other sources is insecure... I'd argue this is why it's insecure... Not insecure for individuals. Insecure for oppressive governments.
https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat
The request has not yet been published by GitHub to https://github.com/github/gov-takedowns/tree/master/India/20...
Also not mentioned in the project's GitHub repository yet per https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Apermissionlesstech%2Fbitc...
Note that India is heavily dependent on money from elsewhere (hence a lot of recent policy changes to bring in more foreign money). It is a net importer and isn’t strong enough on exports.
There are some recent policy changes to attract more foreign currency deposits with lots of expectations.
If there is a hint that these subversive actions are also going to hurt the economy, there is a tiny, tiny sliver of a chance that the powers that be will be a bit more afraid of losing the next round of elections in the state governments and in a few years at the union level. That could possibly limit the ignorant knee jerk reactions and bans.
https://updates.techforpalestine.org/bitchat-for-gaza-messag...
To imagine that US MNCs readily obey these orders. There was a time when Gmail exited China due to Aurora attacks, and Chinese GFW is universally hated, so why is India allowed to create a GFW like censorship on US platforms? Indian courts have even blocked Reuters articles GLOBALLY before. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/19/india-judg...
Does Apple still allow side loaded apps ?