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A comment on India’s Government Wants Total Control of the Internet. Parent comment

Re:India’s Government Wants Total Control of the Internet by mc32 on Monday February 13, 2023 @12:06PM (#34776357)
One solution (not an ideal solution) might be where every entity that wants to serve the citizens of a sovereign country have to have a local company that serves the local population, a local subsidiary like in most brick and mortar industries.

They may even require that all compute happen locally. And of course that all content and so on meet local regulations. Sort of like what we see with other telecommunication, be it T-mobile or other. Sure, they operate in many countries, but they have local staff and follow local rules.

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Re:India’s Government Wants Total Control of the Internet by MichaelZuo on Monday February 13, 2023 @12:19PM (#34776621)
Couldn't New Delhi just tell Youtube HQ to obey worldwide and enforce it on all their subsidiaries, or lose the market?

In that case it wouldn't matter how many intermediary entities are there between HQ and local operations.

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Re:India’s Government Wants Total Control of the Internet by mc32 on Monday February 13, 2023 @12:28PM (#34776809)
Yah right now they could take that stand. In the future I can imagine an international governing body that would set rules around these things.
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Re:India’s Government Wants Total Control of the Internet by whimsicalism on Monday February 13, 2023 @12:43PM (#34777117)
Seems like if you can just will an international governing body into existence, there isn't even any need for subsidiary cloak-and-dagger.
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Re:India’s Government Wants Total Control of the Internet by karmakaze on Monday February 13, 2023 @12:51PM (#34777238)
What if Alphabet calls the bluff and stops serving all of their services in the market. The population would know why which wouldn't be a good look for leaders. Google is too invested in $earch to call a bluff though.
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Re:India’s Government Wants Total Control of the Internet by peoplearepeople on Monday February 13, 2023 @01:03PM (#34777484)
Alphabet would be shooting themselves in the foot doing that, they'd be giving a local competitor a solid footing, which they could then expand from to the US
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Re:India’s Government Wants Total Control of the Internet by MichaelZuo on Monday February 13, 2023 @01:03PM (#34777481)
Google has competitors in the search space so it's understandable why they're afraid of calling bluffs.

And from what I understand Youtube isn't profitable by itself.

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Re:India’s Government Wants Total Control of the Internet by Retric on Monday February 13, 2023 @02:08PM (#34778560)
Why do you think it’s unprofitable? Last estimate I looked at showed YouTube as being wildly profitable.
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Re:India’s Government Wants Total Control of the Internet by MichaelZuo on Monday February 13, 2023 @06:15PM (#34782384)
Can you link to the estimate?
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Re:India’s Government Wants Total Control of the Internet by Retric on Monday February 13, 2023 @06:59PM (#34782853)
YouTube revenue got a huge bump in 2021 which is when that wildly profitable estimate was given.

I don’t have specific estimates I can link to, but I’ve seen statements like this fairly regularly: There are more questions around YouTube’s profitability, but he said the general view was that it was “modestly profitable but not dramatically so.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/technology/youtube-financ...

Of course when Google actually disclosed what percentage of their revenue came from YouTube it was well below the 20% suggested in that piece.

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Re:India’s Government Wants Total Control of the Internet by MichaelZuo on Monday February 13, 2023 @08:50PM (#34784056)
> YouTube revenue got a huge bump in 2021 which is when that wildly profitable estimate was given. I don’t have specific estimates I can link to...

What is 'that wildly profitable estimate' then?

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Re:India’s Government Wants Total Control of the Internet by bilbo0s on Monday February 13, 2023 @02:00PM (#34778412)
They did that with China.

And Chinese entrepreneurs just kind of said, "SWEET!", then swept in with their own startups offering those services.

I'd imagine there are a lot of Indians, even here in the US, that would make a headlong rush back to India to start up web service companies if our companies said we won't service India any longer.

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Re:India’s Government Wants Total Control of the Internet by newswasboring on Monday February 13, 2023 @12:08PM (#34776400)
India is kind of moving towards this? Data security is a big discussion in whatever policy discussion is left in the country. I think legislation is in the works to mandate that all data related to indian citizens need to be in India and not leave it's virtual borders.
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Re:India’s Government Wants Total Control of the Internet by blululu on Monday February 13, 2023 @01:25PM (#34777825)
Mainland China already does this. The extent to which this is a real solution are pretty dubious. When the local rules are reasonable and local everything is fine, but a large enough country the government can start trying to use its weight to encroach on the severity of other countries and push across whatever fence the company has set up.
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