Comment by AnthonyMouse

> Whenever something somehow touches multiple jurisdictions, it's generally safe to assume that laws from all of them apply.

How do you suppose this is supposed to work on the internet? Is every globally-accessible social media site supposed to implement Saudi Arabia's blasphemy laws and China's censorship of Tienanmen?

> Countries can and do make laws that apply entirely extraterritorially. When that makes it difficult to do a thing while complying with all applicable laws, you either have to not do the thing or pick which jurisdictions' laws you want to break and deal with the consequences.

But that's the point. There will be services that actually are outside of any given jurisdiction and have no fear of penalties from it, and then those laws are pointless because they're unenforceable.

> I don't think most lawmakers will consider the potential embarrassment from difficult-to-enforce laws much of a deterrent against outlawing what they want to outlaw.

That's only because they have no shame. It's the government which is humiliated, not the politicians. Which is why the voters should learn to punish them for their vandalism of the public trust.

> They're more likely to put additional requirements on third parties to assist with enforcement (e.g. VPN providers are an obvious candidate.)

How is that supposed to work when the whole purpose of the VPN itself is to be in a different jurisdiction?

The typical go-to in these cases is to try to use the financial system, but that doesn't work in this case because there are plenty of foreign VPN services that will offer the service "for free" by installing a residential proxy on your machine or accept payment in cryptocurrency in an amount that a normal person could easily mine themselves. And then unsophisticated users do the former and sophisticated users do the latter and the only thing you get from banning payments to foreign VPN providers is the facilitation of DDoS botnets and increased and familiarity of your population with cryptocurrency.