>Indians aren't very fond of foreign rule, and no control is more potent than control over information and ideas.

One of the elements missing in the intra-US debate is that a lot of the hostility that much of the country feels toward Silicon Valley is generated from a very similar feeling. To many, how culturally distant elites on the coasts are from those in "middle America" coupled with how much power the former has over the later ... it can, at times, make it feel like there's an element of foreign rule. Technology has made it a lot easier to project cultural power - once you have it. Once you lose it, it seems it's almost impossible to get it back.

No, the question is whether Indians are free to choose to read things which are inconvenient to the Indian government [but not at all irksome to rich coastal Americans], or whether the Indian government gets to determine which information and ideas are allowed to be disseminated online in India. Facebook and Twitter seek only to control their own, separate platforms.

(Plus of course what will actually happen is that Facebook and Twitter will comply, and Indian users of those platforms will be subject to both the whims of California-based moderators and the Indian government's current penchant for objecting to pictures of funerals and suggestions they might not be doing a wonderful job. The potency of control of information and ideas in action; nobody in the upper echelons of the Indian government cares about Zuckerberg's policy on the lab-leak theory...)