Garena Free Fire has been banned in India and the reason is unclear

Garena Free Fire is the next big mobile game to be banned by the Indian government. This comes at a time when Free Fire's popularity is on the rise, not only among casual gamers, but also within the esports scene. In fact, Team Vitality India announced its roster for Free Fire just eight hours ago.

PUBG Mobile and 117 other Chinese apps were banned in September 2020 – under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology – for being “harmful to the sovereignty and integrity of India, the defense of India, the security of the State and public order. » The ministry believed that these applications illegally collected data on Indian citizens, amid a period of border conflicts between the two countries.

According to a recently released list, 54 new apps and games have been banned, including Garena Free Fire, Conquer Online and a number of social apps. Oddly enough, Free Fire Max – the premium version of the app – is still available on the Google Play Store at the time of writing, making this ban rather inconsistent as the country primarily uses Android phones.

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“Upon receipt of the interim order passed under Section 69A of the IT Act, in accordance with due procedure, we informed the affected developers and temporarily blocked access to the applications which remained available on the Play Store in India,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement, as reported by TechCrunch.

However, there seems to be some confusion, mainly because Garena is not actually a Chinese company. The first wave of bans came after border conflicts between India and China escalated in late 2020. Garena, however, is a Singaporean company, so the reason for "defense of India" invoked by the authorities does not exactly apply here.

Although Garena operates from Singapore, 18,7% of it is owned by Chinese conglomerate Tencent. Tencent was the main reason why PUBG Mobile was banned in 2020, with Indian authorities accusing the Chinese tech giant of collecting and monitoring data on its citizens.

Unconfirmed reports also claimed that Garena Free Fire was not actually banned via Section 69A, but Section 9(1) instead. It states that anyone who monitors or collects traffic data and information will be prosecuted. There has been no statement from the Modi government on this. This seems a bit unusual, as the latest wave of bans has been constantly talked about and almost even celebrated by the government as if it were a decisive blow. Information on this is still scarce, we will update the story as we learn more.

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