What can Pichai, Zuckerberg or Biden do to us in India?

President of France Emmanuel Macron, Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel and Secretary General of the United Nations Antonio Guiterres wrote that the world needs to unite for sustainable development to tackle climate change, reduce inequality and bring the coronavirus pandemic under control. "The rise of new technologies has been a great asset for progress and inclusion," they write. "Moreover, the considerable power of new technologies can be misused to limit the rights and freedoms of citizens, to spread hatred, or to commit serious crimes." Human beings have adapted every invention, from the wheel to build chariots to the telegraph to communicate with front line troops, towards waging war. The history of conflicts in Europe stretches back thousands of years. "I know that men are won over less by the written word than the spoken word, that every great movement on this earth owes its growth to great orators and not to great writers," Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1925. Hitler would not have been able to control the narrative the way he did if an open internet had given a voice to all citizens of Germany. "We need to build on existing initiatives toward effectively regulating the internet in order to create a safe, free, and open digital environment," write the three. That is precisely what China does through its infamous Great Firewall. "When they came for Myanmar's leaders, they cut off the internet," reported ABC news. "But plunging the country into cyber darkness has precedent in Myanmar and it comes straight out of the authoritarian playbook. Countries from Russia to Ethiopia, Iran to India have all recently shut down the internet in varying degrees." Myanmar, Iran, Ethiopia, we are in benevolent company. "Prepare for the next Great War: Big Tech versus the Nation-State," wrote Jaspreet Bindra. "The specific implementation of encryption technology that has worried governments the world over is the signal protocol (E2EE) , which guarantees that even intermediaries who provide these services will not be able to decrypt these messages in transit," wrote Anand Venkatanarayanan. India tried to stop WhatsApp from using E2EE. "In 2010, Google published a blog post, detailing how Chinese state backed hackers, attacked Gmail to spy on Chinese human rights advocates via a backdoor, installed by Google at the behest of the US government in Gmail to comply with search warrants on users." Corruption and crime are easy excuses for dictators, like Xi Jinping, to enhance their power by locking up anyone who opposes their views. Jack the Ripper existed long before the internet was even dreamed of. The Indian government wants people to believe its own version of events and uses technology to monitor what citizens are doing, even using the pandemic as an excuse. Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg or Joe Biden can do nothing to a citizen of India in India. The state, on the other hand, has a monopoly on violence and it uses its powers to the fullest extent to crush any challenge to its activities. The internet has set people free. Politicians and civil servants hate it. Wish we could do 'jouhatsu' in India.