Ban the Internet

[picoico]

@ravage

Dont count on it. The revenue generated from advertisers catering to the Pakistani market is a drop in the bucket. Pakistan doesnt have much of an ecommerce market. A more likely result is the pricing out of Pakistan in the money they quote to advertisers.

This is a problem beyond Pakistan. When you start talking about countries like China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey, Brazil, India, which aren’t as free-wheeling as the West when it comes to free speech, they need to have provisions in place.

I don’t know if they will react to Pakistan’s blockage, or if Pakistan will maintain it. But this is a drop in the bucket; there will be more events like this, and I don’t think these corps will be on the winning side. As I said in another post, I think this issue more closely resembles issues of net taxation, and sites like Pirate Bay.

All corporations? So you are saying this principle should be applied to all organizations yes? Making the slippery slope argument for me I see.

All corporations operating in forieng countries are obligated to abide by local laws and regulations. Failure of one, does not mean failure of all.

Yes, things to get complicated if Facebook and Google have an inadvertant presence in Pakistan due to the net’s global nature.

The net is still the wild west, hardly a mature virtual village. We’ll see how things go…

Well heres the thing, you seem to have a lot of confidence in local talent but I assure you we need these corporations more than they need us.

Dude, nobody needs facebook or google…

For all your strategic application of the law these kinds of appoaches harm us much more strategically than it harms them.

Who is “them”? Facebook? Nobody really looses anything except a bunch of teens.

If you read the little bit of coverage of the debates, it was PTA that was taking the harm argument (i.e. that they stood to lose money, that this might result in being disconnected entirely from the net) and the Islamic lawyers movement that was arguing from the perspective of principle (a lawyer said something to the effect we can starve/sacrifice our lives for Islam).

Yes, but then no rationale was given as to why they would want to disconnect from the net altogether.

I’ll give you one simple example. Go to outsourcing sites and a sizable bit of development is in development for tools to be used on these big sites that you’d like to see banned. Facebook widgets/apps. Google apps. the local talent you’d like to encourage needs access to such sites.

Weak. Move up the value chain to Java EE, .Net. SAP. Flash. Shopify. so on and so on.

Second, if Pakistani developers are significant factors in development for goole apps, Facebook widgets, and so on…it’s in Google, Facebook, etc. best interst to do the simple thing, flag the content, so a significant developer community of theirs can continue to support their platform.

The point of precedence is not that all speeders should get speeding tickets, but that any speeder established to be speeding and capable of being punished should be punished.

YES! Exactly. Note how you just avoided a very silly slippery slope argument?

It is well within the capability of PTA to ban the Internet (in the meaning I’ve elaborated) and Google (which it did).

LOL, now the analog is giving speeding tickets to people who are bloody well walking.

You modified your post to say you didnt think it was such a bad idea to ban google. Bismillah. Karain ban. Why dont you take the first step and pledge here never to use google again…

LOL…wow…you really have an emotional attachment to Google…Bing is not that bad…give it a try.

And for the record, the suggestion was that Pakistan would survive without Google, and I whimsically suggested that maybe even local developers would get a chance to show their stuff…if such talent exists. So yes, ravage, take that as seriously as you want…whatever spins yer wheel.