Comment by voxic11
14 hours ago
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.
Then Law is both broken, and dumb -
This is not exactly your focus, but this means that it can be possible for there to be a set of laws in U, such that an action is required and illegal if not present, but that this same action is illegal in C...
I.e., the predication is both meaningless and pointless, unless the supposition is that the laws of U don't hold - if C extradites a citizen of U over said action, is then U's law not supreme?
I understand that's probably how the law works, but it is kind of nonsensical to me that it passively allowing visitors from a country would pull you into their jurisdiction. Requiring you to be responsible for blocking any users to your service from U ensures seems analogous to an author of a book that is illegal/censored in U being required to make sure that no one from U buys the book and takes it back to their country.
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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.
Bad example, especially githen the fact that Durov is a french national.
That's certainly a valid risk, if I were to put myself physically at the mercy of Turkish armed law enforcement inside their borders. In my particular case there's no public information that links my real name to the hosting company, as my work is behind the scenes.
Could Turkish intelligence link me to the company if they spent significant resources researching the hosting company that provides services to their political enemies? Probably. Do I have any personal plans to take a vacation in Turkey any time soon, or a pressing need to visit Turkey? No.
I am pretty sure we also have someone, somewhere hosting something that insults the King of Thailand, so I suppose that's a risk too.
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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