You Can't Un-invent Bluetooth

I read about the Bitchat thing on my lunch break and thought about it for the rest of the afternoon, which is more attention than most tech news deserves these days.

Quick version: Jack Dorsey built an app called Bitchat that lets nearby phones talk to each other over Bluetooth, no internet, no cell service, just device to device mesh networking. Useful at festivals, useful in national parks, useful anywhere the signal drops out. Also useful, it turns out, if your government has just switched off mobile internet in your neighbourhood because people are protesting something. India’s cybercrime agency told GitHub to pull the repositories. The stated reasoning was the usual grab bag: anonymous communication, evasion of “lawful surveillance”, risk of misuse by terrorists and “anti-national elements.” That last phrase is doing a lot of work.

Here’s the bit that got me. This isn’t really a story about one app. It’s a story about what happens when a government’s control depends on a chokepoint that technology has quietly started routing around. For years, “shut off the internet” has been the blunt instrument of choice during unrest, dozens of countries have done it, India more than most. It works because almost everyone’s phone is useless without a tower. Mesh networking breaks that assumption. Doesn’t need the tower. Doesn’t need a SIM. Just needs enough phones close enough together, which, handily, is exactly what a protest is.

So the government did the only thing it could reasonably do within its own borders: go after the distribution point. Tell GitHub to take it down. Except the code’s open source, it’s already forked a dozen times, someone’s sideloading the APK by now, and there’s a thread full of people trading tips on Meshtastic and Reticulum like it’s a gardening forum. You can pull a listing off a shelf. You can’t pull software out of the world once enough people have a copy. The Streisand effect, except the thing being amplified is a communication protocol instead of a photo.

I don’t have a mesh node on my roof and I’m not about to buy one, but I get the appeal in the same way I get the appeal of a good backup generator. You hope you never need it. It’s nice knowing it’s there. A few years back my daughter and I were bushwalking near Wilsons Prom and lost signal for most of a day, and it did cross my mind, in an idle, safe, first-world way, how strange it is that a piece of glass in my pocket is a supercomputer and a total brick the second the tower’s out of range. Nobody’s freedom depended on that. But multiply the stakes by a thousand and you start to see why people in Delhi cared enough to start using this thing in the first place.

I’ll say the obvious tension out loud rather than pretend it isn’t there: decentralised, unblockable communication is genuinely good for dissidents and genuinely good for people organising something worse than a protest. Both things are true. A government that can’t distinguish between the two, or worse, doesn’t want to, will always reach for the broadest possible ban. “Could be misused by terrorists” is the kind of justification that covers literally every piece of communications technology ever invented, including the telephone. It’s not evidence of anything except that the tool works.

The Microsoft-owns-GitHub angle is its own small case study in how leverage actually flows in a global economy. A US company with commercial interests in the Indian market is not going to tell the Indian government to get stuffed over one open source repo, whatever its founder’s press release says about believing in an open internet. Nobody involved is a villain exactly. It’s just that “we do business everywhere” and “we stand on principle everywhere” turn out to be mutually exclusive commitments, and profit wins that argument nine times out of ten. I don’t say that with much heat. It’s just how the incentives are built.

What I keep landing on, and I don’t think this resolves neatly, is that the ban will not work and everyone involved probably knows it won’t work, and they’re doing it anyway. Partly for show, partly because a government has to be seen to be doing something, partly because banning things is cheap and building trust with your citizens is expensive. Governments reach for the switch because the switch is what they’ve got. Software doesn’t care about switches nearly as much as it used to.

I don’t know how this ends in India specifically. I do know the tech isn’t going anywhere, and neither is the impulse to restrict it. Both of those things are just going to keep bumping into each other for a long time yet.