Comment by dmitrygr
8 months ago
They could fight and choose not to. They could ignore this and choose not to. They deserve our judgement for that
8 months ago
They could fight and choose not to. They could ignore this and choose not to. They deserve our judgement for that
They did fight it in court. They lost.
I'm surprised you're so keen on having big tech companies intentionally ignore court orders and just break the law. Like, it's obviously something none of us should want.
There's a really bad equilibrium where every country (or at least every country big enough to have BigTech workers in their country) figures out they can globally censor the internet by using the assets and people of those companies as leverage. Then we would have Americans having their internet censored by every foreign power except China and Russia, where BigTech have largely left.
And it would all be done under the color of local law.
I see nothing in this article suggesting that the court order is for a global block, rather than a regional one. Do you have a source for that?
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Why should we not want this when the law is bad? The government should face pushback from all sides when attempting something odious.
It's a democratic country. The voters decide if the laws their government passes are bad or not.
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One answers is that this case isn't actually a bad law. This appears to be blatant organized piracy. What's odious about copyright laws? This also appears to be pretty much the gold standard of due process. It's not like somebody submitting automated DMCA requests on videos with silent audio tracks or something. It's a court order for these specific domains, which would have been carefully curated and has been quite literally litigated.
The other answer is that you really don't want big corporations to be ignoring laws they don't like, because odds are pretty good that your list of bad laws doesn't match theirs. Countries have sovereignty. If a company doesn't want to obey those laws, they should not operate in that country. If the law really were bad, the way you'd actually fix this is by the democratic process. That's up to the voters, not foreign corporations.
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There is other alternative, such as: get rid of their DNS service entirely, or make a petition for changing these laws.
What good would getting rid of their DNS service do?
Making a petition to change the laws sounds like a great way of achieving nothing. It will certainly not mean you get to ignore the court orders.
Shutting down public DNS in France would be an option (a garbage option that nobody would actually choose in this case and that'd solve nothing, but an option nonetheless). That's not what dmitrygr was asking for though. They want big tech companies to ignore legitimate court orders to protect some scummy football pirate sites.
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Is a non-French company obligated to obey a French court order? I can probably name a few countries where most US companies won't enforce the court order from them
They have paying customers in France/they operate their business in France for a profit. Just because their headquarters aren’t there doesn’t make it a non-French related business.
The article is too thin to know what, if any fight was had.
I suspect France could find a way to make things very difficult for them all.
I suppose they could withdraw their service from the country in protest, but it's not obvious that would leave anyone better off.
It's a difficult call and I'm not prepared to harshly judge an organization for complying with a legal, enforceable injunction.
If you want to judge someone so badly, why not go after the politicians who are creating these despicable policies?