Comment by bogeholm
12 hours ago
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.
“Dear France, have your ISPs block us because we won’t block you” could buy a few days of uptime there.