Comment by thewebguyd
7 months ago
> in case just by being accessible there you incur a liability.
This is a dangerous precedent though that IMO everyone should fight against.
It's how we get the balkanization of the internet, and the death of it as a global network.
TBH we also shouldn't put the onus on blocking "unsafe" countries on the website owners, nor an intermediary like CloudFlare. If a nation wants to block certain content, let the nation deal with it by getting their own ISPs to block and make sure the citizen's anger gets correctly placed on their government and not the site operators.
> If a nation wants to block certain content, let the nation deal with it by getting their own ISPs to block and make sure the citizen's anger gets correctly placed on their government and not the site operators.
I don’t really understand comments like these. Even if you’re exactly right about how it should work, how would you make this happen in the world we live in? Neither the tech community nor ISPs nor cloud companies decide these things. Just because a matter affects us doesn’t mean we have much of a voice in it especially if it’s legal.
Laws about tech are decided by (idiot) politicians/parties/governments and the consequences are enforced by massive fines, imprisonment, etc. by law enforcement and selective (and often politically motivated) prosecution. In some of the worst places the consequences could include death.
Afghanistan just lost access to the internet almost entirely. China and North Korea are famous for their firewalls. Much of Asia has internet blackouts whenever there are large scale protests. The western world’s government has more legal jurisdiction/economic influence on the companies that run these things and are increasingly leveraging that for their desired censorship.
If the answer to this is democratic influence, the populations of many countries don’t really have that, the majorities in countries that do have it certainly doesn’t know or care about these things and wouldn’t vote for the pro-censorship politicians in the first place if they’d then vote to cut off their nation’s access to uncensored internet while preserving the uncensored variants, and even if the majority ever did care to get the system to work in this way there’s a global trend away from having their opinions on such things matter anyway.
I’m equally baffled by all of these calls for extensive regulation and enforcement of Internet rules on HN. Someone in the comment section is unironically calling for imprisoning parents who let their kids use the internet. There are suggestions throughout the comment section calling for ID checks on websites.
Is nobody thinking about what this actually means? Do you really want the entire internet to require ID validation every time you use it? Do you want your government deciding if your content is okay to view, or okay to post? Do you welcome the level of tracking of privacy violations that inherently come with this much government intervention?
It seems people on HN have a sudden wake up call whenever these rules get too close to reality, like when access to websites gets cut off or ID verification is added to websites that they use. My theory is that they’re imagining a world where only the services they dislike get regulated: The TikToks and Facebooks of the internet. None of these people calling for extensive regulation are thinking that sites they use would ever end up on the regulated sites list, but if you enjoy any site with user submitted content (Hacker News included) then you’re calling for additional regulation and tracking of yourself when you demand these things.
Requiring businesses that provide products or services that we've already decided should be age gated to check ID is not the same as requiring all sites to check ID. Stores that sell porn or drugs or guns in person need to check ID. That hasn't resulted in all stores checking ID, or even stores that sometimes check ID (e.g. grocers selling alcohol) checking it all of the time. They only do for restricted items. No reason web businesses can't do the same.
Sites with user generated content already have to have some level of moderation to remove copyrighted or illegal materials (e.g. child porn). So it's not a big difference to say if you want to have user generated content and not be considered an adult site, you need to take down any submitted adult content (or only allow it in adult verified areas or whatever). If HN doesn't allow people to post their amateur smut stories, it could then be unaffected.
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The balkanization is being caused by the UK. No technical solutions prevent this.
It’s rather ironic, because the very kind of “social credit score” that we were told the Chinese are subject to is has existed in the West and is being implanted in a far more sly way with things like tone policing; arbitrary accusation of rule breaking of ever increasingly narrow, convoluted, and subjective rules enforced by faceless mods and surely son by AI bots, bans, and even extraordinary lengths to hunt down anyone that “evades a ban”.
I just heard about that TikTok has already implement a censorship regime that excludes topics and concepts for which you get a ding on your social credit score. Not even something that was done when China was racially in control of TikTok.
Welcome to Schufa in Germany, the “social credit score” without which is almost impossible to rent or buy in most German cities, if the report (which most folks hardly know how it gets calculated) doesn't have the right numbers on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schufa
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It depends on the kind of website. If you're not advertising, selling anything, or otherwise doing any business through your website you're much more emboldened to not care about every jurisdiction.
But if you're trying to make money through your website... well sorry you're doing business in those countries and I don't have a ton of objection to you needing to follow foreign laws.
I'm fine with "balkanization" (I know some people from the Balkan countries... maybe they'd object to the use of that word) if it means a freedom divide and actual consequences for countries ever eroding freedoms.
> But if you're trying to make money through your website... well sorry you're doing business in those countries.
Say, I'm the provider... well sorry, you (the customer) are doing business with a foreign country (mine) and you should do it in accordance with YOUR laws about YOUR country's foreign trade.
That's the only way to properly conform to jurisdiction, amirite?
In other words, UK has no jurisdiction over US businesses who conduct business from US soil, UK cannot force them to obey UK law just because a UK citizen decided to buy something over the internet. The UK can punish THEIR citizens for what the UK considers unlawful trades and that's always the case no matter what.
Claiming jurisdiction over foreign businesses ends up in a completely lunatic situation where every business, in every country, has to obey the laws of every other country just because some people might decide to order from abroad. Block, ban, punish only where you have jurisdiction, everything else ends up in sheer insanity.
OK, but that's not true, pretty much anywhere. If it's illegal to provide a service to people in a country, it's illegal wherever your site is based. It may be hard to enforce, and in most cases the authorities won't try, but if it's serious enough then they totally will. This is the same basis for extraditing people who sell rootkits or CSAM, or for when the US imprisoned the bosses of European gambling companies on charges of providing services to US customers. BetOnSports was a listed companies in London, and sports betting is legal in the UK. Didn't stop the US authorities arresting and imprisoning the CEO for years when he took a flight that connected via Dallas. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8339338.stm)
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> That's the only way to properly conform to jurisdiction, amirite?
No, you're not? It's pretty obvious that if you try to, say, sell illegal drugs to my citizens, I as a country will come after you even if it's legal on your side.
The internet blurred the lines because you don't "show up" in the buyer's country but there's nothing new here: both seller and buyer need to respect the law.
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I love this idea of businesses doing and selling whatever the F they want and citizens being punished based on laws in their country. not sure why US businesses even have to obey US laws?!? just punish the consumers/citizens and be done with it
of course defining what “US” business is might be quite challenging, is Apple a US company?! They make nothing in the US and pay no taxes in the US … love this idea though!
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The huge plus of the internet is that you can be disruptive on a global scale on a somewhat even footing to the giants.
If you place a giant burden such that before you even do anything of value you need to conform to 100s of different laws/regulations from 100 different countries you create a world where only large companies can exist and everyone else is pushed out.
Isn't that the goal of these nonsense laws?
It's how we get the balkanization of the internet, and the death of it as a global network.
That ship sailed at least a decade ago.
From small instances like your employer blocking certain web sites (Google Translate, seriously?) to China's Great Firewall to nations restricting access in certain regions (India, many others), to nations restricting access to certain web sites (Turkey, many many others), to entire countries taking themselves entirely offline (Afghanistan, most recently).