Comment by pyrale
12 hours ago
Quick question: what would happen if you decided to simply shield yourself from France’s action without applying any change to your dns? Or is blocking french users considered a compliant answer by French courts?
I don’t get why you would still need to block french users if you also need to exit the jurisdiction.
Because continuing to provide the service to French users would mean they have not exited the jurisdiction. You cant provide services in a jurisdiction and at the same time expect not be subject to that jurisdiction. That's just not how any country treats legal jurisdiction.
Yes but if you don’t have any assets in the country you could not liable, that was OP’s point.
But even being based in Switzerland I believe there’s some inter-countries agreements, so it would not be practical.
Let's say you are a software company based in country C (company) and offer services to users in country U (users), only over the internet, and having no physical assets in country U. You could imagine Microsoft offering Office 365 to customers in Liechtenstein, for example.
GP's point is that whenever you sell or offer something to users in U, you have to abide by U's laws in doing so - no matter whether you did that all while sitting at your desk in country C.
Whether or not enforcement or liability is realistic is up to the relationship between U and C I guess - my guess is France and Switzerland are on pretty good terms.
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The problem is that, technically, an IP address doesn't have a country. GeoIP is at best a suggestion, and it is trivial to route your traffic through a "foreign" IP.
It is about as enforceable as "don't read letters written by redheaded people": it'll never be airtight, and it'll always have a huge amount of false positives.
The only possible "solution" is to ban all open devices from the internet, mandate a DRM-style "trust zone", have the device do mTLS, and embed a realtime DNA sequencer in every device.
Don't give them ideas... That's the wet dream they all salvate at... complete control of what's allowed to be published with a instant way of banning content and people.
As a side project I help out with some technical stuff at a hosting company that provides services to a political group that is strongly anti Erdogan. The infrastructure is in the USA.
We do not block IP traffic from known Turkish ISP ranges. The customer (the political group) receives all sorts of dire legal warnings and threats that what they publish is contrary to Turkish law.
None of our other hosting platforms are configured to block any traffic to/from Turkish IP ranges. We have no business presence or financial involvement with anything domestically in Turkey. Am I subject to Turkish jurisdiction? I don't think so.
But by what you wrote, I am providing services in Turkey.
If you go to Turkey you might find yourself in a prison until you abruptly close this website. This is what happened to Pavel Durov (Telegram creator) in France. Telegram now complies with French law, because otherwise Pavel Durov would still be in French prison.
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Hence the “shield” part. I guess it’s easier said than done when you’re a Swiss non-profit and not an anonymous sysadmin in Iraq (or whatever jurisdiction would work for this example, idk).
> whatever jurisdiction would work for this example
The Principality of Sealand*
* until the UK or French navy shows up