On January 18 2012, Wikipedia went black to draw attention to SOPA [0], a bill they described as one that "could fatally damage the free and open Internet".
Since then, we've seen a slow and steady march in the direction we all dreaded. Country after country has decided that they have the right to block content on the "free and open Internet", and business after business (even those who joined the SOPA protests) has complied. Someone looking ahead from 2012 would barely recognize the internet today as being the same thing, the way we just roll over to the threats that used to cause global outrage and defiance.
Were we naive even at the time? Have governments become more authoritarian? Or has our energy for resistance just been slowly whittled away?
Dividing the world into normies and others is a very odd way to characterise widespread adoption of anything. I hesitate to use the neckbeard word, but it's got overtones.
There are as many usefully curated sites, as sites where state actors curate content to hide the reptile led barcode truth from the normies.
It's just politics... Replace "open internet" with "land" and imagine countries (ie people) are attempting to block others access to some resource. It was naive to assume that the internet wouldn't adhere the nature of our reality.
Judging by the various misinformation legislation they're rushing to adopt, yes. The free internet said too many things that powerful people didn't like.
I mean it's a pretty fundamental tenet of liberty that you have the freedom to do things only to the extent that you don't harm others.
And it's a simple consequence of scaling that the more massively you scale a communication system like the internet the more pathways there are for person A to harm person B.
So naturally there end up being more cases evaluating harm that involve the internet. Some of those cases will involve ordinary judicial things like injunctions.
And all of that is true regardless of whether you believe any one particular injunction is justified or unjustified. It's just a matter of what happens at scale.
You can, of course, try to give up the notion that liberty ends when you start causing harm, and many people have gone down that path. But for those of us who are still in the liberty camp, these questions are difficult and involve weighing a number of concerns and claims. And anyone who thinks they have easy answers is probably just deeply confused or high on rhetoric.
It's not just governments. It's people that support grandiose efforts against "misinformation", "disinformation" and "malinformation".
> Or has our energy for resistance just been slowly whittled away?
People don't have energy to hear wrong and dangerous opinions anymore. Everything dangerous to the current order should be banned, otherwise fascism is inevitable.
Media has always been salacious nonsense — at least, judging from the 1880s English newspapers I’ve read as part of a research writing class: they’re full of complete lies about Jack the Ripper, for instance.
Most of the discussion from government is using that perennial fact to justify suppressing true information — eg, suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story or people’s personal experiences with the COVID vaccine. Even though that collapsed both trust in media and trust in medical institutions.
To add to the sibling comment about the courts, from Wiki:
> Starting in 2021, news outlets began to authenticate some of the contents of the laptop. In 2021, Politico verified two key emails used in the Post's initial reporting by cross-referencing emails with other datasets and contacting their recipients. CBS News published a forensic analysis which examined a "clean" copy of the data obtained directly from Mac Isaac. It concluded that the "clean" data, including over 120,000 emails, originated with Hunter Biden and had not been altered
> The laptop and some of its contents played a visible role in federal prosecutors’ case against the president’s son, who was charged with lying on a firearm application in 2018 by not disclosing his drug use. A prosecutor briefly held up the laptop before the jury in Delaware, and an F.B.I. agent later testified that messages and photos on it and in personal data that Mr. Biden had saved in cloud computing servers had made his drug use clear.
I don't know that COVID is a great example. The people most upset about 'authoritarian' abuses by gov't during COVID are themselves extremely authoritarian. Just about different topics.
I otherwise agree that authoritarianism is on the rise, across the board.
>>> Were we naive even at the time? Have governments become more authoritarian? Or has our energy for resistance just been slowly whittled away?
Yes, naive to think that we could live in a world without fences. The internet makes it very cheap to tear down fences. Yet, good fences make for good neighbors. It was always naive to think that governments would let a torn-fences world, remain untouched.
"In July 2024, ANI filed a lawsuit against Wikimedia Foundation in the Delhi High Court — claiming to have been defamed in its article on Wikipedia — and sought ₹2 crore (US$240,000) in damages.[16][17][18] On 5 September, the Court threatened to hold Wikimedia guilty of contempt for failing to disclose information about the editors who had made changes to the article and warned that Wikipedia might be blocked in India upon further non-compliance. The judge on the case stated "If you don't like India, please don't work in India... We will ask government to block your site".[19][20] In response, Wikimedia emphasized that the information in the article was supported by multiple reliable secondary sources.[21] Justice Manmohan said "I think nothing can be worse for a news agency than to be called a puppet of an intelligence agency, stooge of the government. If that is true, the credibility goes."[22]"
I suppose that this might not be the most objective article on Wikipedia. I don't have context for these statements. The way that Wikipedia quotes the judge makes it sound like he's threatening to order the Indian government to block Wikipedia because Wikipedia says that ANI is government propaganda. Is that really what's going on? If so it seems extremely ironic, to the point of tacitly admitting ANI's links to the Indian government. I know hacker news has many Indian readers; can they provide some context or an alternative perspective?
No. You read the statements right. Indian judges tend to give such statements, sometimes even worse. For example, recently one judge in unrelated case gave a statement that “criminalising marital rape is bit harsh”.
The main problem in this case is that Wikimedia hasn’t complied YET with high court orders of revealing people who did the edits. ANI just went ahead and filed contempt of court case before Wiki legal team could respond. I’m not sure if initial order came with some sort of deadline or not. I guess they are trying to leverage the delay in their favour.
In my opinion, ANI and many media houses in India are partially controlled by incumbent party ( BJP ) either by incentives or manipulation, you can read about Income tax raid on BBC and some other media outlets for understanding their methods.
>> "In my opinion, ANI and many media houses in India are partially controlled by incumbent party ( BJP ) either by incentives or manipulation, you can read about Income tax raid on BBC and some other media outlets for understanding their methods."
By the Indian court standards, HN would be compelled to globally take down this topic.
This. They're following the Orban-Erdogan-Harper (International Democratic Union) playbook - purge the judiciary of independent judges, control the news media, and open culture-war fronts to distract and sap the strength of opposition while riling up your base. The situation in the world's largest democracy is a very dire one.
That's an actual quote? That's so, juvenile. And it admits pretty much all of the 'defamation' that Wikipedia is being sued for.
Also a bit stupid to ask someone to not work in India if they point out they have no legal presence there. If they really have no presence in India it might make most sense to just call their bluff. The government does indeed have the power to block the webpage but there's no winning against a government that is willing to go that far. One can only hope that blocking wikipedia is unpopular enough to give the government pause.
I can understand shutting it down to Indian IP ranges, but the whole world? I think they should have stood up to the Indian court and took wikipedia offline for India, otherwise soon there will be avalanche of demands to take down anything negative about modi, trump, xi, and putin.
Time to sit back and wait for the Streisand effect [0] to kick in...
When will they learn that trying to hide things from the Internet is never that simple (as evidenced by the already-posted archive links)?
Indeed. I never would have heard or cared about this statement or the high court. Now, I'll let the rage driven by an unwarranted attack against a purely beneficial institution cool a bit from white hot before engaging.
I wonder what would be an effective countermeasure against stuff like this. Maybe we need a write-only global database and somehow separate the hosting/publisher from the organization that certifies it. Imagine if they simply sign an archive which is distributed over IPFS or some other distributed system. It would become impossible to take down content and as such impossible to comply with any blocking orders. They can issue a revocation but users are no obligated to respect that.
> I wonder what would be an effective countermeasure against stuff like this.
Good, trustworthy governance.
I think its childish to try and make an ungovernable internet. Nobody actually wants to live in an ungovernable world. We want fraudulent credit card charges to be reversable. We want the parents of the victims of Sandy Hook to be able to get alex jones to shut up.
I don't think pushing further to make the law impossible to enforce on the internet is the right direction. The right direction is to step up and work to make good rules. And maybe that means sites like wikipedia or google don't function in countries where the government has values incompatible with liberal democracy. That's fine.
Maybe some day we have an internet which is actually divorced from meatspace government. When that happens, we'll need to do governance ourselves. Having no rules at all is the dream of naive children.
You don't get to decide the governance, especially in countries you don't live in. The collective action problem is too hard. Technological solutions can be implemented by anyone with sufficient skill and scales easier. Governance always defends the powerful, whereas technology enforces the laws of physics and mathematics and in this case it defends the free flow of information.
This example shows that you can't just shut off free speech to a few rogue nations, because states 'incompatible with liberal democracy' include the majority of the world's population. As we see, they hold enough influence to assert their censorship on all of us, regardless of where we are.
What hypothetical 'trustworthy governance' would be less susceptible to India's influence than WMF is in this case?
Some context that is essentially personal opinion, take it for what it's worth:
It's not that ANI is an absolutely non-partisan and an objective outlet. They do lean pro-government, but the yardstick being applied here is not consistent at all. No Indian news outlet is great by that yardstick, but one is being called an absolute sham, and those who consistently take anti-establishment stances, often without merit, barely get a footnote.
Now you could argue that Wikipedia is volunteer-driven, and you could submit an edit, but it is hard. During the farmers' protests ~3 years ago, articles were worded in a manner that led one to believe that deaths by natural causes among the protestors were somehow caused by the protests. I just checked the article as I was writing this response, and there is still a detailed section titled "fatalities" that mostly documents deaths from natural causes. I tried sending in edits for some of this back in the day but faced an uphill battle against other contributors and gave up because I had a day job to get to.
None of this justifies a page being blocked, especially outside Indian jurisdiction, but it would be unwise to ignore the broader context about the website being an ideological battleground and not being able to pull off the right balance.
The only way in which this could be possible, if not via VPNs, is via everyone have direct satellite internet, which is a bit difficult without good line of sight. It would also require an independent means of payment like layer II of bitcoin.
The better answer would be one where the ISPs don't have any ability to block websites. Web3 technologies could make it possible.
That's not quite accurate. E2EE, mesh networks, and similar are also available alternative technologies. Satellites are still corporate-driven (necessarily) or government driven and thus can be focal points to block.
At the time of the suit's filing, the Wikipedia article about ANI said the news agency had "been accused of having served as a propaganda tool for the incumbent central government, distributing materials from a vast network of fake news websites, and misreporting events on multiple occasions". The filing accused Wikipedia of publishing "false and defamatory content with the malicious intent of tarnishing the news agency's reputation, and aimed to discredit its goodwill".
The filing argued that Wikipedia "is a platform used as public utility and as such cannot behave as a private sector". It also complained that Wikipedia had "closed" the article about ANI for editing except by Wikipedia's "own editors", citing this as evidence of defamation with malicious intent and evidence that WMF was using its "officials" to "actively participate" in controlling content. ANI asked for ₹2 crore (approximately US$240,000) in damages and an injunction against Wikipedia "making, publishing, or circulating allegedly false, misleading, and defamatory content against ANI".
The case was filed in July 2024 before Justice Navin Chawla in the Delhi High Court as ANI Media Pvt. Ltd. v Wikimedia Foundation Inc & Ors. ANI argued that Wikipedia is a significant social media "intermediary" within the definition of Information Technology Act, 2000, and must therefore comply with the requirements of the Act, including taking down any content that the government or its agencies deem violative, or be personally liable for content published under its platform. Chawla issued a summons to WMF, called the lawsuit "a pure case of defamation" and set a hearing date of 20 August. On 20 August 2024, Chawla ordered WMF to disclose identifying details of three editors (also defendants in the lawsuit) who had worked on the Wikipedia article about ANI to allow ANI to pursue legal action against them as individuals. Chawla ordered WMF to provide the information within two weeks.
On 5 September, ANI asked the court to find WMF in contempt when the identifying details were not released within the time frame. Chawla issued a contempt of court order and threatened to order the government of India to block Wikipedia in the country, saying "We will not take it any more. If you don't like India, please don't work in India...We will close your business transactions here." In response, Wikimedia emphasized that the information in the article was supported by multiple reliable secondary sources. Chawla ordered that an "authorised representative" of WMF appear in person at the next hearing, which was scheduled for 25 October 2024.
On 14 October, Delhi High Court justices Manmohan and Tushar Rao Gedela objected to the creation of an English Wikipedia article about the defamation case, saying the article "disclos[ed] something about a sub-judice matter" and "will have to be taken down", and scheduled review for 16 October. On 16 October, the court stated that "Accordingly, in the interim, this Court directs that the pages on Wikipedia pertaining to the single judge as well as discussion of the observations of division bench be taken down or deleted within 36 hours".
If the court order specifies that it be taken down worldwide, and the court order isn't definitely illegal according to Indian law, and the Wikimedia Foundation has operations in India that they want to preserve, they may not have a choice.
I don't think that the Indian court has legitimacy to block the article to be displayed worldwide. It has no jurisdicition for the citizens of all other countries and also no jurisdiction against content that is not hosted in India.
But I guess that it was maybe more convenient for the wikimedia foundation to do it like that instead of doing geofencing that they might not have?
The legitimacy of Indian courts is something only Indian citizens and people living in India can decide. Other people may have opinions, but they are more or less irrelevant.
Anyway, the fundamental issue here is that domestic rulings often have international consequences. As a sovereign state, India obviously has the right to ban the Wikimedia Foundation, or any other foreign entity, from doing business within the county. That right is an essential aspect of sovereignty. If they don't like you, they can ban you. But if the Wikimedia Foundation values access to India more than their right to host a particular article, they may choose to comply with the demands of an Indian court, even in matters where the court does not have jurisdiction. And that compliance would technically be voluntary.
> India obviously has the right to ban the Wikimedia Foundation
I don’t think that’s obvious at all. In the US, constitutional rights to freedom of speech, assembly, etc apply regardless of nationality or citizenship status.
You are placing too much weight on constitutions. They are just temporary documents a sovereign state can rewrite at any time for any reason. Either by the process established in the existing constitution. Or by having a civil war or a revolution, with the winners deciding that the old constitution is void, because its supporters lost.
> As a sovereign state, India obviously has the right to ban the Wikimedia Foundation, or any other foreign entity, from doing business within the county
I fundamentally disagree. The Indian State exists to serve its citizens, which are benefitted unambiguous by a free and unconstrained source like Wikipedia. The sovereignty of any state is subject to the benefit of its citizens, not the other way around.
That doesn't mean they won't try anyway, but let us not confuse what is technically or politically feasible with what is moral.
That's something only Indian citizens and people living in India can decide. Outsiders may have opinions, but they cannot override the will of the people who have a legitimate standing in the matters of the state.
And note how I included "people living in India" here. Legitimacy is a fuzzy concept. Citizenship is a legal category, and it should not matter for legitimacy as such. But it is widely accepted that citizens living outside their country still have a legitimate standing in the matters of the country. But beyond that, a legitimate government should serve the interests of the people factually living within the country. India does not have a large non-citizen population, and the distinction is mostly irrelevant with them. But some other countries do. If their governments only serve the interests of their citizens, they are fundamentally illegitimate.
This is something I've been curious about for a while. GDPR, IIUC, makes an EU law apply to things that happen inside the US (for example, EU person flies to the US and uses Facebook on US-housed servers with data stored in the US, GDPR apparently considers that in-scope for the law).
> This is something I've been curious about for a while. GDPR, IIUC, makes an EU law apply to things that happen inside the US (for example, EU person flies to the US and uses Facebook on US-housed servers with data stored in the US, GDPR apparently considers that in-scope for the law).
That's a common myth. The GDPR doesn't follow citizenship, even if a lot of unofficial guidance wrongly says that.
US-based businesses that aren't branches of companies established in the EU, not targeting people in the EU, and not profiling or otherwise monitoring the behavior of people in the EU are not subject to the GDPR. And "in the EU" cares about where the person's body is, not who issued their passport.
This European Commission summary of GDPR's Article 3 (Territorial scope) is informative:
However, your scenario may fall in-scope of the GDPR for a simple reason: the Meta Terms of Service specify that the data controller for users (and non-users) living in the EU is Meta Platforms Ireland Limited, which is a company established in the EU. When the data processor or controller activities are through a company or branch established in the EU, the GDPR applies no matter where in the world the person and the data are.
You want operate in country X, you must comply with country X laws or be ready to be percecuted. (From notice, to confiscation of servers, to executions; depends on the X and how inconvenient you are)
More broadly, if country X has the capacity to enforce its rulings against you, it is risky to assume that they do not apply to you, irrespective of what you think should be the case base on how you operate, where you are located, your citizenship, etc.
Many states have a wide variety of provisions applying national law in ways that might be contrary to all kinds of naive assumptions about how their jurisdiction should be limited
Why is following other countries' laws viewed as "abandoning all principles"?
A few days ago Linux removed all Russian maintainers to follow US laws. Has the Linux Foundation abandoned all principles? Should they have fought the US government?
In some sense, they did. The spirit of free software is inherently pro-freedom and against any external actors being able to pressure your entity into submission. This includes any and all legal threats or orders. Look at the history of PGP for an instance of fighting the US government to defend a greater principle.
In practice you can't fight everyone all at once. On the net it may be better to compromise on some to defend others you cherish more.
The intent was to remove people of any nationality who work for Russian companies from being kernel maintainers. The way they rolled that out didn't match their intent, though.
I agree, this makes no sense. Can the "Russian High Court" block access to all pages mentioning the invasion of Ukraine and Wikipedia will just comply worldwide?
Well, yes, they can. Just because some court ruling tells you to do something doesn't magically makes you do it. You have a choice to ignore that rulling and (maybe) face consequences:
- fine(s)
- arrest(s)
- asset confiscation
If WMF has no physical presence in Russia - there is no way to enforce this ruling and can be "ignored".
It can't end. Each sovereign entity is unique, and they interact in an anarchy. There's no way to get kings to treat Moldova the way they treat the united States.
> Long-form reports by The Caravan and The Ken, along with reports by other media watchdogs have described the agency as serving as a propaganda tool of the incumbent government.[8][7][23]
I wonder how long such a description of a US news outlet like CNN, Fox, NYT or WashPo would last on English Wikipedia.
>Fox News has been characterized by many as a propaganda organization.[24][25][26][27][28] Its coverage has included biased and false reporting in favor of the Republican Party, its politicians, and conservative causes,[29][30][31] while portraying the Democratic Party in a negative light.
Too lazy to check the others. The NYT undoubtedly has a lengthy section on the buildup to the Iraq War, where they would have been a "propaganda tool of the incumbent government."
> The NYT undoubtedly has a lengthy section on the buildup to the Iraq War, where they would have been a "propaganda tool of the incumbent government."
This comment might come across as sarcastic, possibly implying that Wikipedia wouldn't cover such a thing. To be clear, Wikipedia has an entire article entitled "List of The New York Times controversies" (linked from the main article), which does indeed mention the Iraq War (among other things) in the summary, with a section to elaborate, linking to the article on Judith Miller for much more extensive elaboration.
The article has not been blocked by Indian government but by Indian judiciary system with a trial, there's a difference. Also trials in India take a lot of time and conclusions are reached after much thought.
Also Wikipedia does not have a good track record of its editors free from misleading articles for defamation and propaganda. I won't trust at all the article in Wikipedia about the war between Wikipedia and ANI. The article (archive) already seems to present the court in a bad flavour.
Yeah that is wrong, but many are under the impression that Indian government has started stomping on free speech and that the judiciary are just completely whimsical.
http://archive.today/XIxZv
On January 18 2012, Wikipedia went black to draw attention to SOPA [0], a bill they described as one that "could fatally damage the free and open Internet".
Since then, we've seen a slow and steady march in the direction we all dreaded. Country after country has decided that they have the right to block content on the "free and open Internet", and business after business (even those who joined the SOPA protests) has complied. Someone looking ahead from 2012 would barely recognize the internet today as being the same thing, the way we just roll over to the threats that used to cause global outrage and defiance.
Were we naive even at the time? Have governments become more authoritarian? Or has our energy for resistance just been slowly whittled away?
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PI...
As more normies got on the web more of it becomes about how to herd them.
In the early days there was less gain from authoritarian actions, because you are more likely to be resisted by the users of any service.
The current users don't know how to bypass restrictions, and are generally more numerous. Making authoritarian actions more valuable.
Unfortunately this leads to previously useful sites declining.
Dividing the world into normies and others is a very odd way to characterise widespread adoption of anything. I hesitate to use the neckbeard word, but it's got overtones.
There are as many usefully curated sites, as sites where state actors curate content to hide the reptile led barcode truth from the normies.
The solution is to move to the dark web and make your site unpalatable to normies.
The posison slug strategy.
It's just politics... Replace "open internet" with "land" and imagine countries (ie people) are attempting to block others access to some resource. It was naive to assume that the internet wouldn't adhere the nature of our reality.
That’s not a fair comparison: land is finite in a way that the open internet isn’t.
> Have governments become more authoritarian?
Judging by the various misinformation legislation they're rushing to adopt, yes. The free internet said too many things that powerful people didn't like.
An Australian example: https://x.com/SenatorRennick/status/1834455727764869593#m
I mean it's a pretty fundamental tenet of liberty that you have the freedom to do things only to the extent that you don't harm others.
And it's a simple consequence of scaling that the more massively you scale a communication system like the internet the more pathways there are for person A to harm person B.
So naturally there end up being more cases evaluating harm that involve the internet. Some of those cases will involve ordinary judicial things like injunctions.
And all of that is true regardless of whether you believe any one particular injunction is justified or unjustified. It's just a matter of what happens at scale.
You can, of course, try to give up the notion that liberty ends when you start causing harm, and many people have gone down that path. But for those of us who are still in the liberty camp, these questions are difficult and involve weighing a number of concerns and claims. And anyone who thinks they have easy answers is probably just deeply confused or high on rhetoric.
> Have governments become more authoritarian?
It's not just governments. It's people that support grandiose efforts against "misinformation", "disinformation" and "malinformation".
> Or has our energy for resistance just been slowly whittled away?
People don't have energy to hear wrong and dangerous opinions anymore. Everything dangerous to the current order should be banned, otherwise fascism is inevitable.
Do you think that there's a link between an extreme proliferation of misinformation and people wanting to control it?
No.
Media has always been salacious nonsense — at least, judging from the 1880s English newspapers I’ve read as part of a research writing class: they’re full of complete lies about Jack the Ripper, for instance.
Most of the discussion from government is using that perennial fact to justify suppressing true information — eg, suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story or people’s personal experiences with the COVID vaccine. Even though that collapsed both trust in media and trust in medical institutions.
The chain of custody issues alone render the laptop story incredible
To add to the sibling comment about the courts, from Wiki:
> Starting in 2021, news outlets began to authenticate some of the contents of the laptop. In 2021, Politico verified two key emails used in the Post's initial reporting by cross-referencing emails with other datasets and contacting their recipients. CBS News published a forensic analysis which examined a "clean" copy of the data obtained directly from Mac Isaac. It concluded that the "clean" data, including over 120,000 emails, originated with Hunter Biden and had not been altered
Tell that to the courts, I guess.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/11/business/media/hunter-bid...
Excerpt:
> The laptop and some of its contents played a visible role in federal prosecutors’ case against the president’s son, who was charged with lying on a firearm application in 2018 by not disclosing his drug use. A prosecutor briefly held up the laptop before the jury in Delaware, and an F.B.I. agent later testified that messages and photos on it and in personal data that Mr. Biden had saved in cloud computing servers had made his drug use clear.
iCloud isn’t the laptop, let’s be clear
> have governments become more authoritarian
People themselves have become more authoritarian. COVID-19 rings a bell.
I don't know that COVID is a great example. The people most upset about 'authoritarian' abuses by gov't during COVID are themselves extremely authoritarian. Just about different topics.
I otherwise agree that authoritarianism is on the rise, across the board.
>>> Were we naive even at the time? Have governments become more authoritarian? Or has our energy for resistance just been slowly whittled away?
Yes, naive to think that we could live in a world without fences. The internet makes it very cheap to tear down fences. Yet, good fences make for good neighbors. It was always naive to think that governments would let a torn-fences world, remain untouched.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_News_International covers the lawsuit as well.
"In July 2024, ANI filed a lawsuit against Wikimedia Foundation in the Delhi High Court — claiming to have been defamed in its article on Wikipedia — and sought ₹2 crore (US$240,000) in damages.[16][17][18] On 5 September, the Court threatened to hold Wikimedia guilty of contempt for failing to disclose information about the editors who had made changes to the article and warned that Wikipedia might be blocked in India upon further non-compliance. The judge on the case stated "If you don't like India, please don't work in India... We will ask government to block your site".[19][20] In response, Wikimedia emphasized that the information in the article was supported by multiple reliable secondary sources.[21] Justice Manmohan said "I think nothing can be worse for a news agency than to be called a puppet of an intelligence agency, stooge of the government. If that is true, the credibility goes."[22]"
I suppose that this might not be the most objective article on Wikipedia. I don't have context for these statements. The way that Wikipedia quotes the judge makes it sound like he's threatening to order the Indian government to block Wikipedia because Wikipedia says that ANI is government propaganda. Is that really what's going on? If so it seems extremely ironic, to the point of tacitly admitting ANI's links to the Indian government. I know hacker news has many Indian readers; can they provide some context or an alternative perspective?
No. You read the statements right. Indian judges tend to give such statements, sometimes even worse. For example, recently one judge in unrelated case gave a statement that “criminalising marital rape is bit harsh”.
The main problem in this case is that Wikimedia hasn’t complied YET with high court orders of revealing people who did the edits. ANI just went ahead and filed contempt of court case before Wiki legal team could respond. I’m not sure if initial order came with some sort of deadline or not. I guess they are trying to leverage the delay in their favour.
In my opinion, ANI and many media houses in India are partially controlled by incumbent party ( BJP ) either by incentives or manipulation, you can read about Income tax raid on BBC and some other media outlets for understanding their methods.
Sounds like an authoritarian government that should be ignored.
Unrelated:
>> "In my opinion, ANI and many media houses in India are partially controlled by incumbent party ( BJP ) either by incentives or manipulation, you can read about Income tax raid on BBC and some other media outlets for understanding their methods."
By the Indian court standards, HN would be compelled to globally take down this topic.
This. They're following the Orban-Erdogan-Harper (International Democratic Union) playbook - purge the judiciary of independent judges, control the news media, and open culture-war fronts to distract and sap the strength of opposition while riling up your base. The situation in the world's largest democracy is a very dire one.
Indeed.
That's an actual quote? That's so, juvenile. And it admits pretty much all of the 'defamation' that Wikipedia is being sued for.
Also a bit stupid to ask someone to not work in India if they point out they have no legal presence there. If they really have no presence in India it might make most sense to just call their bluff. The government does indeed have the power to block the webpage but there's no winning against a government that is willing to go that far. One can only hope that blocking wikipedia is unpopular enough to give the government pause.
I can understand shutting it down to Indian IP ranges, but the whole world? I think they should have stood up to the Indian court and took wikipedia offline for India, otherwise soon there will be avalanche of demands to take down anything negative about modi, trump, xi, and putin.
Since when does Delhi high court have worldwide jurisdiction?
Since Wikipedia folded to their demands. The correct action would have been to black out India, but they chose otherwise
Time to sit back and wait for the Streisand effect [0] to kick in... When will they learn that trying to hide things from the Internet is never that simple (as evidenced by the already-posted archive links)?
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
Indeed. I never would have heard or cared about this statement or the high court. Now, I'll let the rage driven by an unwarranted attack against a purely beneficial institution cool a bit from white hot before engaging.
I wonder what would be an effective countermeasure against stuff like this. Maybe we need a write-only global database and somehow separate the hosting/publisher from the organization that certifies it. Imagine if they simply sign an archive which is distributed over IPFS or some other distributed system. It would become impossible to take down content and as such impossible to comply with any blocking orders. They can issue a revocation but users are no obligated to respect that.
> I wonder what would be an effective countermeasure against stuff like this.
You withdraw all operations from within that country and you don't comply.
Doesn't work, see Brazil vs X.
Censorship friendly competitors BlueSky and Threads swooped in and took away X's users and revenue.
BlueSky couldn't stop boasting how many users it got from the fiasco, and their posts were highly upvoted on HN and celebrated.
> I wonder what would be an effective countermeasure against stuff like this.
Good, trustworthy governance.
I think its childish to try and make an ungovernable internet. Nobody actually wants to live in an ungovernable world. We want fraudulent credit card charges to be reversable. We want the parents of the victims of Sandy Hook to be able to get alex jones to shut up.
I don't think pushing further to make the law impossible to enforce on the internet is the right direction. The right direction is to step up and work to make good rules. And maybe that means sites like wikipedia or google don't function in countries where the government has values incompatible with liberal democracy. That's fine.
Maybe some day we have an internet which is actually divorced from meatspace government. When that happens, we'll need to do governance ourselves. Having no rules at all is the dream of naive children.
You don't get to decide the governance, especially in countries you don't live in. The collective action problem is too hard. Technological solutions can be implemented by anyone with sufficient skill and scales easier. Governance always defends the powerful, whereas technology enforces the laws of physics and mathematics and in this case it defends the free flow of information.
>Good, trustworthy governance.
This example shows that you can't just shut off free speech to a few rogue nations, because states 'incompatible with liberal democracy' include the majority of the world's population. As we see, they hold enough influence to assert their censorship on all of us, regardless of where we are.
What hypothetical 'trustworthy governance' would be less susceptible to India's influence than WMF is in this case?
Thank you. We're seeing a far more insidious and accelerating nationalization and politicization of reality. A very dangerous world ahead.
We're seeing the effects of globalisation.
India has no right to control what the rest of the world sees.
This article might be more informative although I can't say how accurate it is: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/wikipedia-suspends-ac...
Some context that is essentially personal opinion, take it for what it's worth:
It's not that ANI is an absolutely non-partisan and an objective outlet. They do lean pro-government, but the yardstick being applied here is not consistent at all. No Indian news outlet is great by that yardstick, but one is being called an absolute sham, and those who consistently take anti-establishment stances, often without merit, barely get a footnote.
Now you could argue that Wikipedia is volunteer-driven, and you could submit an edit, but it is hard. During the farmers' protests ~3 years ago, articles were worded in a manner that led one to believe that deaths by natural causes among the protestors were somehow caused by the protests. I just checked the article as I was writing this response, and there is still a detailed section titled "fatalities" that mostly documents deaths from natural causes. I tried sending in edits for some of this back in the day but faced an uphill battle against other contributors and gave up because I had a day job to get to.
None of this justifies a page being blocked, especially outside Indian jurisdiction, but it would be unwise to ignore the broader context about the website being an ideological battleground and not being able to pull off the right balance.
Pretty similar to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-sur-Haute_military_ra...
Does the WMF have any presence in India? Why don't they just ignore the ruling?
All of Wikipedia would likely be banned which, I assume, they want to avoid.
If I were Wikipedia, I would just shut off access for a week or two.
Yet another need for alternative, private internet connections. Authoritarianism should be acutely subverted.
The only way in which this could be possible, if not via VPNs, is via everyone have direct satellite internet, which is a bit difficult without good line of sight. It would also require an independent means of payment like layer II of bitcoin.
The better answer would be one where the ISPs don't have any ability to block websites. Web3 technologies could make it possible.
That's not quite accurate. E2EE, mesh networks, and similar are also available alternative technologies. Satellites are still corporate-driven (necessarily) or government driven and thus can be focal points to block.
How can they claim defamation when the original sentence said "(ANI has) been accused of...?" The bar of truth for that statement is absurdly low.
From the removed article:
At the time of the suit's filing, the Wikipedia article about ANI said the news agency had "been accused of having served as a propaganda tool for the incumbent central government, distributing materials from a vast network of fake news websites, and misreporting events on multiple occasions". The filing accused Wikipedia of publishing "false and defamatory content with the malicious intent of tarnishing the news agency's reputation, and aimed to discredit its goodwill".
The filing argued that Wikipedia "is a platform used as public utility and as such cannot behave as a private sector". It also complained that Wikipedia had "closed" the article about ANI for editing except by Wikipedia's "own editors", citing this as evidence of defamation with malicious intent and evidence that WMF was using its "officials" to "actively participate" in controlling content. ANI asked for ₹2 crore (approximately US$240,000) in damages and an injunction against Wikipedia "making, publishing, or circulating allegedly false, misleading, and defamatory content against ANI".
The case was filed in July 2024 before Justice Navin Chawla in the Delhi High Court as ANI Media Pvt. Ltd. v Wikimedia Foundation Inc & Ors. ANI argued that Wikipedia is a significant social media "intermediary" within the definition of Information Technology Act, 2000, and must therefore comply with the requirements of the Act, including taking down any content that the government or its agencies deem violative, or be personally liable for content published under its platform. Chawla issued a summons to WMF, called the lawsuit "a pure case of defamation" and set a hearing date of 20 August. On 20 August 2024, Chawla ordered WMF to disclose identifying details of three editors (also defendants in the lawsuit) who had worked on the Wikipedia article about ANI to allow ANI to pursue legal action against them as individuals. Chawla ordered WMF to provide the information within two weeks.
On 5 September, ANI asked the court to find WMF in contempt when the identifying details were not released within the time frame. Chawla issued a contempt of court order and threatened to order the government of India to block Wikipedia in the country, saying "We will not take it any more. If you don't like India, please don't work in India...We will close your business transactions here." In response, Wikimedia emphasized that the information in the article was supported by multiple reliable secondary sources. Chawla ordered that an "authorised representative" of WMF appear in person at the next hearing, which was scheduled for 25 October 2024.
On 14 October, Delhi High Court justices Manmohan and Tushar Rao Gedela objected to the creation of an English Wikipedia article about the defamation case, saying the article "disclos[ed] something about a sub-judice matter" and "will have to be taken down", and scheduled review for 16 October. On 16 October, the court stated that "Accordingly, in the interim, this Court directs that the pages on Wikipedia pertaining to the single judge as well as discussion of the observations of division bench be taken down or deleted within 36 hours".
On-wiki discussion here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#T...
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/wikipedia-suspends-ac...
Here is an article from India with some of the story
58 points | 2 days ago | 62 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41921723
They shouldn’t comply on principle. But this trend of global blocks is picking up. See Australia versus X.
Why is it blocked worldwide? Should the page be geofenced instead?
Similar to the enigma of how a court case in India blocks sci-hub from adding new papers for other countries?
[delayed]
If the court order specifies that it be taken down worldwide, and the court order isn't definitely illegal according to Indian law, and the Wikimedia Foundation has operations in India that they want to preserve, they may not have a choice.
I don't think that the Indian court has legitimacy to block the article to be displayed worldwide. It has no jurisdicition for the citizens of all other countries and also no jurisdiction against content that is not hosted in India.
But I guess that it was maybe more convenient for the wikimedia foundation to do it like that instead of doing geofencing that they might not have?
The legitimacy of Indian courts is something only Indian citizens and people living in India can decide. Other people may have opinions, but they are more or less irrelevant.
Anyway, the fundamental issue here is that domestic rulings often have international consequences. As a sovereign state, India obviously has the right to ban the Wikimedia Foundation, or any other foreign entity, from doing business within the county. That right is an essential aspect of sovereignty. If they don't like you, they can ban you. But if the Wikimedia Foundation values access to India more than their right to host a particular article, they may choose to comply with the demands of an Indian court, even in matters where the court does not have jurisdiction. And that compliance would technically be voluntary.
> India obviously has the right to ban the Wikimedia Foundation
I don’t think that’s obvious at all. In the US, constitutional rights to freedom of speech, assembly, etc apply regardless of nationality or citizenship status.
You are placing too much weight on constitutions. They are just temporary documents a sovereign state can rewrite at any time for any reason. Either by the process established in the existing constitution. Or by having a civil war or a revolution, with the winners deciding that the old constitution is void, because its supporters lost.
> As a sovereign state, India obviously has the right to ban the Wikimedia Foundation, or any other foreign entity, from doing business within the county
I fundamentally disagree. The Indian State exists to serve its citizens, which are benefitted unambiguous by a free and unconstrained source like Wikipedia. The sovereignty of any state is subject to the benefit of its citizens, not the other way around.
That doesn't mean they won't try anyway, but let us not confuse what is technically or politically feasible with what is moral.
That's something only Indian citizens and people living in India can decide. Outsiders may have opinions, but they cannot override the will of the people who have a legitimate standing in the matters of the state.
And note how I included "people living in India" here. Legitimacy is a fuzzy concept. Citizenship is a legal category, and it should not matter for legitimacy as such. But it is widely accepted that citizens living outside their country still have a legitimate standing in the matters of the country. But beyond that, a legitimate government should serve the interests of the people factually living within the country. India does not have a large non-citizen population, and the distinction is mostly irrelevant with them. But some other countries do. If their governments only serve the interests of their citizens, they are fundamentally illegitimate.
This is something I've been curious about for a while. GDPR, IIUC, makes an EU law apply to things that happen inside the US (for example, EU person flies to the US and uses Facebook on US-housed servers with data stored in the US, GDPR apparently considers that in-scope for the law).
> This is something I've been curious about for a while. GDPR, IIUC, makes an EU law apply to things that happen inside the US (for example, EU person flies to the US and uses Facebook on US-housed servers with data stored in the US, GDPR apparently considers that in-scope for the law).
That's a common myth. The GDPR doesn't follow citizenship, even if a lot of unofficial guidance wrongly says that.
US-based businesses that aren't branches of companies established in the EU, not targeting people in the EU, and not profiling or otherwise monitoring the behavior of people in the EU are not subject to the GDPR. And "in the EU" cares about where the person's body is, not who issued their passport.
This European Commission summary of GDPR's Article 3 (Territorial scope) is informative:
https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...
Here is Article 3 itself: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-3-gdpr/ (unofficial site but generally accurate)
And guidelines (PDF) about Article 3 from the European Data Protection Board: https://www.edpb.europa.eu/sites/default/files/files/file1/e...
However, your scenario may fall in-scope of the GDPR for a simple reason: the Meta Terms of Service specify that the data controller for users (and non-users) living in the EU is Meta Platforms Ireland Limited, which is a company established in the EU. When the data processor or controller activities are through a company or branch established in the EU, the GDPR applies no matter where in the world the person and the data are.
You want operate in country X, you must comply with country X laws or be ready to be percecuted. (From notice, to confiscation of servers, to executions; depends on the X and how inconvenient you are)
More broadly, if country X has the capacity to enforce its rulings against you, it is risky to assume that they do not apply to you, irrespective of what you think should be the case base on how you operate, where you are located, your citizenship, etc.
Many states have a wide variety of provisions applying national law in ways that might be contrary to all kinds of naive assumptions about how their jurisdiction should be limited
I get that pulling out of India would be an incredibly difficult move to even consider. But abandoning all principles should be as well.
Why is following other countries' laws viewed as "abandoning all principles"?
A few days ago Linux removed all Russian maintainers to follow US laws. Has the Linux Foundation abandoned all principles? Should they have fought the US government?
In some sense, they did. The spirit of free software is inherently pro-freedom and against any external actors being able to pressure your entity into submission. This includes any and all legal threats or orders. Look at the history of PGP for an instance of fighting the US government to defend a greater principle.
In practice you can't fight everyone all at once. On the net it may be better to compromise on some to defend others you cherish more.
> Has the Linux Foundation abandoned all principles?
All? No, but certainly some.
> Should they have fought the US government?
Yes
US laws is not “other countries” laws. Linus lives in US.
… and Finland is on the same side as US anyway, might have similar views.
Btw. Did Linux ban all Russian speaking people or Russian citizen or people with Russian IP addresses?
The intent was to remove people of any nationality who work for Russian companies from being kernel maintainers. The way they rolled that out didn't match their intent, though.
Because of mutual incompatibility of said laws and the inappropriate exercise of alleged sovereignty.
Probably because Wikipedia is a party to the case rather than a disinterested bystander.
I agree, this makes no sense. Can the "Russian High Court" block access to all pages mentioning the invasion of Ukraine and Wikipedia will just comply worldwide?
Well, yes, they can. Just because some court ruling tells you to do something doesn't magically makes you do it. You have a choice to ignore that rulling and (maybe) face consequences:
- fine(s)
- arrest(s)
- asset confiscation
If WMF has no physical presence in Russia - there is no way to enforce this ruling and can be "ignored".
Sovereignty isn't fungible. India's ability to coerce worldwide is significantly higher than Russia's right now.
That's need to end.
It can't end. Each sovereign entity is unique, and they interact in an anarchy. There's no way to get kings to treat Moldova the way they treat the united States.
But when the US government orders a Taiwanese company to stop selling chips to a Chinese company that's just fine right?
They don't quite do that.
You will notice they only order US companies to do so.
ASML, however, abides by U.S. export control regulations because that was a requirement for the approval of the acquisition of SVG.
Everything flows from there.
> Long-form reports by The Caravan and The Ken, along with reports by other media watchdogs have described the agency as serving as a propaganda tool of the incumbent government.[8][7][23]
I wonder how long such a description of a US news outlet like CNN, Fox, NYT or WashPo would last on English Wikipedia.
From the Fox News Wikipedia article
>Fox News has been characterized by many as a propaganda organization.[24][25][26][27][28] Its coverage has included biased and false reporting in favor of the Republican Party, its politicians, and conservative causes,[29][30][31] while portraying the Democratic Party in a negative light.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News
Too lazy to check the others. The NYT undoubtedly has a lengthy section on the buildup to the Iraq War, where they would have been a "propaganda tool of the incumbent government."
> The NYT undoubtedly has a lengthy section on the buildup to the Iraq War, where they would have been a "propaganda tool of the incumbent government."
This comment might come across as sarcastic, possibly implying that Wikipedia wouldn't cover such a thing. To be clear, Wikipedia has an entire article entitled "List of The New York Times controversies" (linked from the main article), which does indeed mention the Iraq War (among other things) in the summary, with a section to elaborate, linking to the article on Judith Miller for much more extensive elaboration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_New_York_Times_con...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller#The_Iraq_War
The NYT isn't a propaganda tool of the incumbent government; they are the mouthpiece of the establishment, which is different.
Without end. These folks are listed as such and worse all across the internet by authoritarians in the US already.
The article has not been blocked by Indian government but by Indian judiciary system with a trial, there's a difference. Also trials in India take a lot of time and conclusions are reached after much thought.
Also Wikipedia does not have a good track record of its editors free from misleading articles for defamation and propaganda. I won't trust at all the article in Wikipedia about the war between Wikipedia and ANI. The article (archive) already seems to present the court in a bad flavour.
That’s fine but why do they think they have jurisdiction over the entire planet?
Yeah that is wrong, but many are under the impression that Indian government has started stomping on free speech and that the judiciary are just completely whimsical.