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Two kind of related points. The jurisdiction stuff is disturbing. Having separate rules/rulings for Belgium, Turkey, Venezuela, etc... It's (a) not practical a

Two kind of related points. The jurisdiction stuff is disturbing. Having separate rules/rulings for Belgium, Turkey, Venezuela, etc... It's (a) not practical and will end up helping incumbents .(b) It really curbs the internet's ability to promote an open information norm. Privacy is an issue and we need to do something about it. But, I have a real feeling cencorship, corporate-protectionism, copyright and other agendas will tag along, once the legislature-courts-enforcement complex is up and running. The sorry state of international law/governance isn't helping, including even the EU. Meanwhile, the recent history of legislative action (eg, the "cookie laws") are not encouraging. I don't think legislators were even aware that it would amount to nothing more than nag screens and terms of use. Don't use incognito, or every site will nag you again, your consent is mandatory and stored as cookie, for extra irony. Ultimately, these things would have been better dealt with at the standards/protocols/browsers level, but I think that ship has sailed.

the_mitsuhiko 9y ago
> The jurisdiction stuff is disturbing. Having separate rules/rulings for Belgium, Turkey, Venezuela, etc... It's (a) not practical and will end up helping incumbents I don’t think so. Only really large corporations are able to serve all areas anyways. Most small companies in the world already cannot afford to serve multiple jurisdictions.
- dbajakkchs 9y ago
  Isn’t serving multiple jurisdictions the default online? You have to go out of your way to treat them differently.
  - SentientNo4 9y ago
    If you run a blog, yes, the global nature of Internet ensures that. If you're running a business, you must abide the law of every jurisdiction you operate in. Companies invest lots of money and effort doing this, from operational (having a physical presence in each region) to technical (e.g. how Amazon has separate sites for each region).
- dalbasal 9y ago
  I disagree. The internet changes this, internationalizes a lot. Also, thinking of this as "companies serving markets" is (imo) a bad frame. HN is serving all countries right now, as it did when there were 54 people reading it the day it launched. Geographic borders may be relevant online, but they may not.
  - madshiva 9y ago
    if internet internationalizes, why US still use retard units? US and other SF startup have put too much pressure with privacy, it's now the time of payback.
te_chris 9y ago
Having jurisdictional restrictions on things like tracking cookies and other invisible forms of surveillance doesn't prevent the internet from working, it does interfere with malicious business models though.
jakobegger 9y ago
I’m looking forward to the GDPR. It seems to target all the failures of the cookie law. The GDPR will not allow blanket consent statements, it will not allow “permission bundling” (eg. allow acces to everything or you can’t use the site). The changes Twitter rolled out in preparation of the GDPR look like a good thing. We’ll see how it turns out, but I think the GDPR will actually force companies to change, beyond cosmetic changes. And since it is valid for all “data subjects” in the EU, companies will have to consider that. The EU is too large a market that companies can ignore it.
- dalbasal 9y ago
  Idk... Some of it could be good, but a legislative approach like this could just turn into a compliance bureaucracy that doesn't help much, but has all sorts of side effects. A lot of people are keen on industry regulations (which GDPR sort of is) but i think are not aware of (a) how bad the bad ones are and (b) the very dominant corporate/incumbent bias they give a market. You can't start a financial firm, tobacco company, etc. There are good sides to that, but some serious (and largely unacknowledged, at least in Europe) aspects to it too. I realize generality and such get in the way of this, but... I think it would have been better if this move specifically targeted the 100 biggest companies, who have the scale an resources to actually use all this tracking data.
  - igorkraw 9y ago
    Oth: it's a calibration process. If the regulations are to onerous, we can loosen them again, or companies will spring up that make compliance easy. https://www.chargebee.com/ https://www.chargebee.com/ solves the European VAT nightmare for example, until we have harmonization on that front. Is it inefficient? Depends on your model of the world: I'd rather pay a bit more for my goods/services and know that my privacy and data autonomy are preserved, and some people might argue that having the freedom of fiscal policy in differing regions is worth paying chargebee their premium. And if we figure out a way to slide into a better pareto point, cool. >I realize generality and such get in the way of this, but... I think it would have been better if this move specifically targeted the 100 biggest companies, who have the scale an resources to actually use all this tracking data. then they'd outsource it, hide it, whatever. See: tax laws. Law is like exercise, you can't specifically target abdominal fat,nor can you specifically target Fortune100 excesses
kome 9y ago
> The jurisdiction stuff is disturbing. That's like saying that democracy is disturbing, but it's the best we have got. FB should respect laws in Belgium, that's it. I don't trust "governance", I trust "government": because it is only at a national level that we see a bit of democratic accountability.
- dalbasal 9y ago
  I agree, national politics is the only politics we have. But, the internet does not exist within national confines, and I don't want it to. In this case, I like the courts decision and FB is big enough to deal with it. What about a much smaller service dealing with polish cencorship laws, Turkish political content laws and 12 incompatible eu privacy laws. It can only end in either (a) overall ineffectiveness or (b) internet balkanization.
- ThrustVectoring 9y ago
  Should Facebook also respect laws in Thailand and remove content for lese majeste? If I lease out a server in the US for $10/mo to serve my blog, should I? Facebook following Belgian law isn't the issue; the issue is that jurisdiction questions have to answer a lot of less-palatable questions the same way.
kitd 9y ago
The jurisdiction stuff is disturbing. Having separate rules/rulings for Belgium, Turkey, Venezuela, etc... It's (a) not practical and will end up helping incumbents . (b) It really curbs the internet's ability to promote an open information norm. I find it disingenious of FaceBook to be serving all the EU equally, then claim that Belgium's jurisdiction doesn't cover them because they're based in Ireland. That sounds like having your cake and eating it.
- dalbasal 9y ago
  I agree, but they're swimming in disingenuous waters. Surely, they can't run 100 versions of the site to suit 100 legislative/court systems. Well, maybe Facebook can. Can tinder? What about the next Facebook?
  - seszett 9y ago
    > What about the next Facebook? Maybe there can be no next Facebook (as in, one multinational actor is position of monopoly on one type of service) and maybe that's not a bad thing. If the only way to have the same kind of service from now one is to use a network of separate entities each smaller than Facebook and interoperating between themselves, it might be a good side effect of the law.
    - dalbasal 9y ago
      If so, that's not a bad result. What I fear is that there is no next FB because fewer people can "enter the market" that in this case is necessarily international .. can't because you need to start with a team of lawyers and compliance officers. FB is unlikely to get injured. They're big and rich and have a deep moat. It would take a lot to shave 5% off its revenue. Making a potential FB competitor restrict itself to a smaller market, and a more localized service... It doesn't take as much.
      - Faark 9y ago
        Yes, such rules would make companies focus on specific local market first and expand slowly. I'm not so sure this is a bad thing. As you said, it doesn't make a difference to existing big companies. Slower growth for new ones could make it more likely we end up with different competitors in different markets (fb west, vk russia, ...) instead a single winner taking it all. And if some potential ideas won't make it cause of slower growth and a some more administrative overhead, I still prefer that over some large foreign evil empire pushing its social norms onto my country.
pjc50 9y ago
As I've said before, ultimately we have to pick one: - single Internet jurisdiction, overriding national sovereignty; in practice this means letting America run the Internet - National Internet jurisdictions, which potentially come with some sort of virtual border policing; Great Firewall(s) - lawlessness, which libertarians will like but produces outcomes increasingly unacceptable to the public
- madez 9y ago
  If we put things into a historic context, then national internet jurisdiction is what will happen.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    Westphalian Wide Web?
- dalbasal 9y ago
  Lawlessness also produces some good things, that people like. Most people are not fuundamentalists, so idk if libertarians looking for theoretical purity are all that relevant (especially here in europe). One of the things lawlessness produced was internationalization and de-censorship of media. That hasn't been without cost, we've had several (mostly failed, but still) political revolutions as a consequence, from Cairo to Hong Kong. At the heart of it was the ungovernability. Countries had to deal with a more or less "take-it-or-leave-it" proposition. China was the first to really break out of that restriction, and I don't think it's a coincidence that (a) a powerful country led the charge or that (b) political cencorship was the leading reason. Another benefit (again, in my view) was a relatively open playing field, commercially. We're worried about power concentrating in the few hands fo FB, Google, and such. But, the internet economy is still a lot higher resolution than most other markets. The big markets are usually highly concentrated (eg, supermarkets, FMCGs, financial services, media, logistics, transport...) or practically confined to small scale niches: local services, real estate... I think we've been getting cynical about this as the winners dig in, but the internet really has been a place where part time tinkerers could compete with $bn mammoths. This is not an anarchist statement, or part of an overarching political ideology. There are, as you say, tradeoffs. There are choices that can create more or less good or bad. Anyway, lets not count chickens just yet. We've seen China regulate the internet effectively for political control and industry protectionism. We've yet to see any country be effective on privacy. We've got the GDPR playing out this year. We've got a more active courts & legislatures. Lets see if privacy actually improves. The worst case scenario is that we end upp with all the negative trade-offs, but all we end up with is a privacy bureaucracy that doesn't affect privacy much. remember that we've seen one (IMO) embarrassing failure go unacknowledged: the cookie law. We got nag screens and compliance audits. We didn't get any privacy.
majewsky 9y ago
> Having separate rules/rulings for Belgium, Turkey, Venezuela, etc... If you dislike that, you should be happy about the GDPR since it's harmonizing data protection law across 28 EU member states.

the_mitsuhiko 9y ago

> The jurisdiction stuff is disturbing. Having separate rules/rulings for Belgium, Turkey, Venezuela, etc... It's (a) not practical and will end up helping incumbents I don’t think so. Only really large corporations are able to serve all areas anyways. Most small companies in the world already cannot afford to serve multiple jurisdictions.

dbajakkchs 9y ago
Isn’t serving multiple jurisdictions the default online? You have to go out of your way to treat them differently.
- SentientNo4 9y ago
  If you run a blog, yes, the global nature of Internet ensures that. If you're running a business, you must abide the law of every jurisdiction you operate in. Companies invest lots of money and effort doing this, from operational (having a physical presence in each region) to technical (e.g. how Amazon has separate sites for each region).
dalbasal 9y ago
I disagree. The internet changes this, internationalizes a lot. Also, thinking of this as "companies serving markets" is (imo) a bad frame. HN is serving all countries right now, as it did when there were 54 people reading it the day it launched. Geographic borders may be relevant online, but they may not.
- madshiva 9y ago
  if internet internationalizes, why US still use retard units? US and other SF startup have put too much pressure with privacy, it's now the time of payback.

te_chris 9y ago

Having jurisdictional restrictions on things like tracking cookies and other invisible forms of surveillance doesn't prevent the internet from working, it does interfere with malicious business models though.

jakobegger 9y ago

I’m looking forward to the GDPR. It seems to target all the failures of the cookie law. The GDPR will not allow blanket consent statements, it will not allow “permission bundling” (eg. allow acces to everything or you can’t use the site). The changes Twitter rolled out in preparation of the GDPR look like a good thing. We’ll see how it turns out, but I think the GDPR will actually force companies to change, beyond cosmetic changes. And since it is valid for all “data subjects” in the EU, companies will have to consider that. The EU is too large a market that companies can ignore it.

dalbasal 9y ago
Idk... Some of it could be good, but a legislative approach like this could just turn into a compliance bureaucracy that doesn't help much, but has all sorts of side effects. A lot of people are keen on industry regulations (which GDPR sort of is) but i think are not aware of (a) how bad the bad ones are and (b) the very dominant corporate/incumbent bias they give a market. You can't start a financial firm, tobacco company, etc. There are good sides to that, but some serious (and largely unacknowledged, at least in Europe) aspects to it too. I realize generality and such get in the way of this, but... I think it would have been better if this move specifically targeted the 100 biggest companies, who have the scale an resources to actually use all this tracking data.
- igorkraw 9y ago
  Oth: it's a calibration process. If the regulations are to onerous, we can loosen them again, or companies will spring up that make compliance easy. https://www.chargebee.com/ https://www.chargebee.com/ solves the European VAT nightmare for example, until we have harmonization on that front. Is it inefficient? Depends on your model of the world: I'd rather pay a bit more for my goods/services and know that my privacy and data autonomy are preserved, and some people might argue that having the freedom of fiscal policy in differing regions is worth paying chargebee their premium. And if we figure out a way to slide into a better pareto point, cool. >I realize generality and such get in the way of this, but... I think it would have been better if this move specifically targeted the 100 biggest companies, who have the scale an resources to actually use all this tracking data. then they'd outsource it, hide it, whatever. See: tax laws. Law is like exercise, you can't specifically target abdominal fat,nor can you specifically target Fortune100 excesses

kome 9y ago

> The jurisdiction stuff is disturbing. That's like saying that democracy is disturbing, but it's the best we have got. FB should respect laws in Belgium, that's it. I don't trust "governance", I trust "government": because it is only at a national level that we see a bit of democratic accountability.

dalbasal 9y ago
I agree, national politics is the only politics we have. But, the internet does not exist within national confines, and I don't want it to. In this case, I like the courts decision and FB is big enough to deal with it. What about a much smaller service dealing with polish cencorship laws, Turkish political content laws and 12 incompatible eu privacy laws. It can only end in either (a) overall ineffectiveness or (b) internet balkanization.
ThrustVectoring 9y ago
Should Facebook also respect laws in Thailand and remove content for lese majeste? If I lease out a server in the US for $10/mo to serve my blog, should I? Facebook following Belgian law isn't the issue; the issue is that jurisdiction questions have to answer a lot of less-palatable questions the same way.

kitd 9y ago

The jurisdiction stuff is disturbing. Having separate rules/rulings for Belgium, Turkey, Venezuela, etc... It's (a) not practical and will end up helping incumbents . (b) It really curbs the internet's ability to promote an open information norm. I find it disingenious of FaceBook to be serving all the EU equally, then claim that Belgium's jurisdiction doesn't cover them because they're based in Ireland. That sounds like having your cake and eating it.

dalbasal 9y ago
I agree, but they're swimming in disingenuous waters. Surely, they can't run 100 versions of the site to suit 100 legislative/court systems. Well, maybe Facebook can. Can tinder? What about the next Facebook?
- seszett 9y ago
  > What about the next Facebook? Maybe there can be no next Facebook (as in, one multinational actor is position of monopoly on one type of service) and maybe that's not a bad thing. If the only way to have the same kind of service from now one is to use a network of separate entities each smaller than Facebook and interoperating between themselves, it might be a good side effect of the law.
  - dalbasal 9y ago
    If so, that's not a bad result. What I fear is that there is no next FB because fewer people can "enter the market" that in this case is necessarily international .. can't because you need to start with a team of lawyers and compliance officers. FB is unlikely to get injured. They're big and rich and have a deep moat. It would take a lot to shave 5% off its revenue. Making a potential FB competitor restrict itself to a smaller market, and a more localized service... It doesn't take as much.
    - Faark 9y ago
      Yes, such rules would make companies focus on specific local market first and expand slowly. I'm not so sure this is a bad thing. As you said, it doesn't make a difference to existing big companies. Slower growth for new ones could make it more likely we end up with different competitors in different markets (fb west, vk russia, ...) instead a single winner taking it all. And if some potential ideas won't make it cause of slower growth and a some more administrative overhead, I still prefer that over some large foreign evil empire pushing its social norms onto my country.

pjc50 9y ago

As I've said before, ultimately we have to pick one: - single Internet jurisdiction, overriding national sovereignty; in practice this means letting America run the Internet - National Internet jurisdictions, which potentially come with some sort of virtual border policing; Great Firewall(s) - lawlessness, which libertarians will like but produces outcomes increasingly unacceptable to the public

madez 9y ago
If we put things into a historic context, then national internet jurisdiction is what will happen.
- pjc50 9y ago
  Westphalian Wide Web?
dalbasal 9y ago
Lawlessness also produces some good things, that people like. Most people are not fuundamentalists, so idk if libertarians looking for theoretical purity are all that relevant (especially here in europe). One of the things lawlessness produced was internationalization and de-censorship of media. That hasn't been without cost, we've had several (mostly failed, but still) political revolutions as a consequence, from Cairo to Hong Kong. At the heart of it was the ungovernability. Countries had to deal with a more or less "take-it-or-leave-it" proposition. China was the first to really break out of that restriction, and I don't think it's a coincidence that (a) a powerful country led the charge or that (b) political cencorship was the leading reason. Another benefit (again, in my view) was a relatively open playing field, commercially. We're worried about power concentrating in the few hands fo FB, Google, and such. But, the internet economy is still a lot higher resolution than most other markets. The big markets are usually highly concentrated (eg, supermarkets, FMCGs, financial services, media, logistics, transport...) or practically confined to small scale niches: local services, real estate... I think we've been getting cynical about this as the winners dig in, but the internet really has been a place where part time tinkerers could compete with $bn mammoths. This is not an anarchist statement, or part of an overarching political ideology. There are, as you say, tradeoffs. There are choices that can create more or less good or bad. Anyway, lets not count chickens just yet. We've seen China regulate the internet effectively for political control and industry protectionism. We've yet to see any country be effective on privacy. We've got the GDPR playing out this year. We've got a more active courts & legislatures. Lets see if privacy actually improves. The worst case scenario is that we end upp with all the negative trade-offs, but all we end up with is a privacy bureaucracy that doesn't affect privacy much. remember that we've seen one (IMO) embarrassing failure go unacknowledged: the cookie law. We got nag screens and compliance audits. We didn't get any privacy.

majewsky 9y ago

> Having separate rules/rulings for Belgium, Turkey, Venezuela, etc... If you dislike that, you should be happy about the GDPR since it's harmonizing data protection law across 28 EU member states.