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Comment by conartist6

1 day ago

Stop it stop it stop it everyone stop writing judgements in tiny countries that say the whole globe must do as one backwater judge says.

I have no respect at all for that judge's authority to do that, only the utmost disrespect for someone who would criminalize such an ordinary thing. If every podunk hyperconservative can write global bans then we will regress to the lowest common denominator

Belgian courts can't decide what an American company does in Chile. However, they can decide what an American company can do in Belgium.

Akamai and friends won't shut down their Belgian contracts for one bad ruling. Their financial incentives (combined with laws that put serving stakeholders' interests above basic human decency) simply don't align.

If it weren't for modern capitalism making all companies part of giant megaconglomerates, the Internet Archive wouldn't have a problem if BelgiAkamai and PayBel stopped serving them. Unfortunately, almost everything you can do or buy online and offline now belongs to maybe 20 or 30 megacorporations which means any court in a reasonably well-off country can have worldwide consequences.

The problem isn't conservatism / liberalism, it's authoritarianism.

I'm conservative and I feel exactly as you do about this type of judge and judgement.

> podunk hyperconservative

What exactly does it mean in simple terms?

  • Podunk people are indigenous to present-day Connecticut. The Podunk were thought to live far away, so living in Podunk grew to mean living in a remote, uninteresting place.

    Originally, it may not have been used kindly. I wonder if Podunk could be thought of as an Americanization of the Roman's barbarians. (The others.)

  • What it means is this, if you are from a polity that has less than 10% of the global population nothing you will ever do matters. You are irrelevant.