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Hypothetical: A Pornhub executive flies from New York to Seoul on Etihad Airways. While transiting in Abu Dhabi airport, they are arrested on charges of obsceni

Hypothetical: A Pornhub executive flies from New York to Seoul on Etihad Airways. While transiting in Abu Dhabi airport, they are arrested on charges of obscenity. What would be the reaction in the US? Factual: In 2006, David Carruthers was arrested while transiting through Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. He was convicted under the RICO act and sentenced to 33 months imprisonment. He was the CEO of the online gambling company BetOnSports, which operated in full compliance with the regulations in the UK and Costa Rica, but accepted bets from American gamblers. Gary Kaplan, another BetOnSports executive, was extradited from the Dominican Republic. The precedent set in the BetOnSports case is either utterly hypocritical or extraordinarily dangerous. If we give every country the right to impose their laws across the whole internet, we don't have an internet any more. A Facebook user posts a comment critical of the Thai royal family; Zuckerberg is sentenced to life imprisonment for lèse-majesté. A Chinese internet user accesses anti-government material via a VPN hosted on AWS and a Google search; Bezos, Page and Brin are all sentenced to 10 years hard labour for subversion.

ubernostrum 9y ago
If you run a business, and decide to do business with people in another country, it's your responsibility to figure out if the business you're doing is legal for that country. This is only a strange idea to a certain segment of internet commenters. The rest of the world has just treated this as the way things are for a long, long, long time. The new, strange, radical idea out of step with established norms is the notion that "on the internet" is some magical lawless, stateless, jurisdictionless place where anything is fair game since nobody could ever prosecute for something that happened in this magical fairyland. It really is time to stop being surprised that you can be arrested and prosecuted for your interactions and business relationship with people, property or other entities in a country of which you aren't a citizen. Also, don't look now, but large tech companies headquartered in the US routinely make changes to their products/services to comply with other countries' laws. If Facebook wants to operate in Thailand, Facebook has to be prepared to comply with Thai law, for example. "We're on the internet" doesn't work as an out.
- ncallaway 9y ago
  > If you run a business, and decide to do business with people in another country I understand this to an extent if specific technical work was done to make a system function in a particular nation (e.g. if the betting site did technical work to accept USD as a payment). But, it's very possible to build a website and not decide to do business with people in another country. It's possible to be running an online business and not need to know what country a user is from. If I never decided to do business with people from a particular country, am I still subject to its laws? In the example, what if Facebook didn't specifically want to operate in Thailand? What if Facebook simple hadn't taken specific technical steps to block Thai users?
  - ubernostrum 9y ago
    If Facebook doesn't want to account for a country's laws, Facebook needs to make sure it never hires employees in that country, never has any key personnel visit that country even briefly, etc. Again: this is not a bizarre new unprecedented never-before-considered hypothetical. In the gambling case, it's actually even easier, by the way, to create jurisdiction since the gambling site needs a way to actually pay out to its customers, which makes it very hard to avoid certain countries' financial rules. I don't particularly care for the US' stance on online betting (but let's face it, those folks aren't caught up in some kind of "how could I have known" situation -- they're like the people who ran the original p2p file-sharing networks saying they were shocked, shocked! to discover that what must have been a tiny, insignificant, sub-microscopic fraction of their users were openly violating laws), but the legal framework around being able to arrest/extradite people and prosecute for crimes which involve people on multiple sides of a border is pretty well-understood and I know of no way in which this is some sort of unprecedented abuse of it. Again, look to the auction sites which got notice from Germany to either stop being accessible at all there, or start filtering out the Nazi stuff so Germans couldn't purchase it.
    - chx 9y ago
      Care to answer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14927785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14927785 my comment elsewhere in this thread? I am really curious.

ubernostrum 9y ago

If you run a business, and decide to do business with people in another country, it's your responsibility to figure out if the business you're doing is legal for that country. This is only a strange idea to a certain segment of internet commenters. The rest of the world has just treated this as the way things are for a long, long, long time. The new, strange, radical idea out of step with established norms is the notion that "on the internet" is some magical lawless, stateless, jurisdictionless place where anything is fair game since nobody could ever prosecute for something that happened in this magical fairyland. It really is time to stop being surprised that you can be arrested and prosecuted for your interactions and business relationship with people, property or other entities in a country of which you aren't a citizen. Also, don't look now, but large tech companies headquartered in the US routinely make changes to their products/services to comply with other countries' laws. If Facebook wants to operate in Thailand, Facebook has to be prepared to comply with Thai law, for example. "We're on the internet" doesn't work as an out.

ncallaway 9y ago
> If you run a business, and decide to do business with people in another country I understand this to an extent if specific technical work was done to make a system function in a particular nation (e.g. if the betting site did technical work to accept USD as a payment). But, it's very possible to build a website and not decide to do business with people in another country. It's possible to be running an online business and not need to know what country a user is from. If I never decided to do business with people from a particular country, am I still subject to its laws? In the example, what if Facebook didn't specifically want to operate in Thailand? What if Facebook simple hadn't taken specific technical steps to block Thai users?
- ubernostrum 9y ago
  If Facebook doesn't want to account for a country's laws, Facebook needs to make sure it never hires employees in that country, never has any key personnel visit that country even briefly, etc. Again: this is not a bizarre new unprecedented never-before-considered hypothetical. In the gambling case, it's actually even easier, by the way, to create jurisdiction since the gambling site needs a way to actually pay out to its customers, which makes it very hard to avoid certain countries' financial rules. I don't particularly care for the US' stance on online betting (but let's face it, those folks aren't caught up in some kind of "how could I have known" situation -- they're like the people who ran the original p2p file-sharing networks saying they were shocked, shocked! to discover that what must have been a tiny, insignificant, sub-microscopic fraction of their users were openly violating laws), but the legal framework around being able to arrest/extradite people and prosecute for crimes which involve people on multiple sides of a border is pretty well-understood and I know of no way in which this is some sort of unprecedented abuse of it. Again, look to the auction sites which got notice from Germany to either stop being accessible at all there, or start filtering out the Nazi stuff so Germans couldn't purchase it.
  - chx 9y ago
    Care to answer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14927785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14927785 my comment elsewhere in this thread? I am really curious.