I was asked to give my opinion on the Consultation Paper on proposed amendments to the ICT Act for regulating the use of social media introduced by the Mauritius government.

The problem with advise is that it is like handing over a roof, built on the walls of concepts, you are passing on the just the roof, and if the receiver does not have those walls already in place, the roof can only be discarded. Since I have been calling Mauritius home for a few years now, I felt obligated to help in any way possible. So the advice mostly comes from a place of wanting to help.

Below was my response:

This move is expected and is what most governments will do but not the right or intelligent step, and eventually will lead to the weakening of the government.

Copying what other governments do will take us to the same place as them – become an outside powerless organization or play a part in creating a 2nd dark age. ( demographic, cultural, and economic deterioration)

I will explain why and I will add an alternative solution at the end.

1.The minor worry is that this would involve setting up a massive proxy infrastructure bloating up the government.

2. Such servers will not have the security and expertise needed to manage them to be an easy target of attacks, primarily state-sponsored attacks.

3.Such acts are wrong from a privacy point of view – now everyone becomes a suspect, and the government has access to private conversations and passwords.

4.They will eventually ask businesses to have their data stored locally by individual countries—something we are already discussing internally as well.

5.It will impact traditional bandwidth providers – as eventually, people will opt for services like Starlink to communicate, and they will become popular.

These steps will lead to the demise of most governments themselves in the long run.

The church imposed similar acts of extreme controls – including recommendations on what to eat and not eat on certain days, etc. – indirectly to support their businesses before its demise as a significant player in society.

The current governments are treading the same path. It will eventually lead to the loss of power entirely and become as powerful as churches are today.

What is the alternative?

The current trend is a massive opportunity for any country that wants to embrace the outcome in advance and stay relevant. This is an alternative course of action for Mauritius:

  • Create a haven for data – not just Mauritius data – but the entire world.
  • Create a data haven framework – mirroring the principles of what Switzerland did for banking.
  • Make it hard for any agency to access data stored in Mauritius.
  • Incentivize companies setting up massive data centers on top of this legal layer to attract major companies.
  • Partner with large, powerful companies to implement step 3 as there will be push back from other countries if Mauritius goes alone.
  • Become the Switzerland of data for the next 100 years.
  • 10X or 100X the GDP and the prosperity of the country.

    • So what will happen if the governments copy each other and take away reason and freedoms?

    Roman civilization believed in reason and working hard to emulate the Gods. The barbarians removed reason; Christianity promised heaven in exchange for doing no work at all – this led to massive decline and the dark ages.

    All innovation and hence all progress is the product of freedom. The intermediary step, in my opinion, will be that governments are tightening power that will lead to them losing control of corporations.

    Eventually, power will move to the individuals – these steps take 100s of years each. But that is the clear direction in which we are going, we can accelerate it or slow it down, but it is inevitable.

    My recommendation is that the government, to stay relevant, should become a positive participant in this process. Doing a legalized “man in the middle attack” on internet traffic is an act of self harm.