Apple and Google's app stores are the next battleground for protests

Snigdha Sharma (0:00)

In the last couple of months, every time protestors gather at Delhi's Jantar Mantar, the mobile internet around them goes dark. It happened again last Friday for 12 hours. But here's the thing about internet shutdowns. Lately, governments across the world are realizing that internet shutdowns have a problem. They can cut people off from the internet without necessarily cutting them off from each other.

In July, when students protesting at Jantar Mantar found themselves without internet, they turned to Bitchat. Bitchat is a messaging app backed by Jack Dorsey. It doesn't need mobile data or Wi-Fi, and it doesn't even need a central server. Instead, it uses Bluetooth to let phones talk directly to nearby phones and pass messages along from one device to another. And India quickly became its biggest market. Between the 17th and 23rd of July, India accounted for 85% of Bitchat's global downloads, which was up from 1% in the previous 30 days. This is according to Censor Tower data.

More than 91,000 people downloaded it in India in just the span of those five days. In fact, on one of those days, more than 3,30,000 people were using it. The government's first response was to go after the code. On the 23rd of July, the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Center, or I4C, under the Home Ministry, ordered GitHub to remove three Bitchat repositories within three hours. The notice did not point to a particular message or a piece of content. Instead, it objected to the way that Bitchat was built. It said that the architecture could allow people to communicate during Internet shutdowns and make lawful interception, attribution, and traceability harder. That order did not make Bitchat disappear though, because open source code can be copied, forked, and shared elsewhere. So now, the fight has moved up another level.

Last Saturday, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued a demand to Apple under Section 69A to remove Bitchat from the Indian App Store. The notice issued by Apple said that the app, and I'm quoting, includes content that is illegal in India. But it did not specify what that content was, and the underlying blocking order has not been made public. Bitchat was also no longer available on Google Play in India after this, although it was not clear whether Google had received the same government order. All of this tells us something interesting about Internet shutdowns. The more protesters learn to root around an Internet shutdown, the more the fight moves up the technology stack, from the cell tower, to the app, to the App Store, and perhaps soon to the phone itself. So, in today's episode, we look at the technology that protesters have turned to when the Internet goes dark, and how governments are learning to follow them. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from The Ken. I'm your host, Snigdha Sharma, and I don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Varghese and I will bring you one business story that's worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Thursday, the 8th of October.

So let's start with the technology itself. Bitchat is essentially a mesh network built out of people's phones. Your phone looks for a nearby Bitchat user over Bluetooth. If it finds one, the two phones can communicate directly. And messages don't necessarily have to travel straight from you to the person that you're trying to reach. They can hop from one phone to another. So if A can reach B and B can reach C, your message can travel from A to C through B.

That means, that the network behaves in almost the opposite way to a con I'm going...

It's called the Mesh Network. Mesh Network is a conventional mobile network. In a conventional mobile network, the phone connects to a tower, the tower connects to a wider network, and if the government switches off that connection, you are offline. In a mesh network, every phone is potentially a part of the network. The more people there are around you using it, the more possible parts that the message has.

But there is an important catch. You need to have the app before you enter the dark zone, or you need someone around you who already has it. Now, hold on to that. Because this basic idea, finding a way for phones to communicate without relying on the internet, is not new. When Egypt's government shut down almost the country's entire internet during the 2011 uprising, Google, Twitter and SayNow built a service called Speak to Tweet over a weekend. You could call a phone number, leave a voicemail and have that message posted to Twitter. It worked without the internet, but only if your phone line still worked. It worked because three companies had built a bridge between the telephone network and Twitter.