[matheweis]

It struck me as I was reading this, the entire reason this is even a possible thing is the advent of the "App Store"

If users obtained thier software elsewhere, the system could still "ban" it, but people would still obtain it.

With the app stores, it becomes fairly easy for a government to unilaterally ban a piece of software.

[umeshunni]

They could still obtain it, but the government could still mandate that local ISPs and telcos block connectivity to it. This is like what they do when they ban websites.

[kuschku]

They couldn’t if users used a federated protocol. You can spin up XMPP servers faster than they can block them.

[matt_wulfeck]

They do ISP-level DNS banning, like what happened with Twitter.

Sometimes we can't engineer ourselves out of a problem and need to do it democratically. Looks like this government is a little rotten if you ask me.

[DroidX86]

The petition was brought forth by an RTI (Right to Information) "Activist" and Web Dev who works on security for private companies. It has nothing to do with the government.

[capote]

Couldn't the government ban the company from making the service available? The app depends on the service.

[JoshTriplett]

The company isn't in their jurisdiction. At most, they could try to block it, like Brazil did.

[capote]

Oh! I didn't realize it worked that way. So they can tell Apple to take something off their App Store because Apple has presence in their country? Would app stores be immune if their company doesn't have a presence in a country?

[ultramancool]

App stores may not be legally required to take it down as they're outside the jurisdiction... but a threat to block the app store entirely in the country is probably enough to get them to budge.

[capote]

Blocking an entire app store is so consumer-unfriendly--is there a chance of that happening in a reasonable country?

[dingo_bat]

Not happening in India. To be realistic, even such a thing as a Whatsapp "ban" isn't going to happen/work. It will be at most similar to how porn is "banned". My ISP returns DNS not resolved for most porn websites if you use their resolver, but they pushed an update to the router changing the DNS to 8.8.8.8. The final result is most people haven't even realized that porn websites are banned.