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We need to have a conversation about jurisdictions in the digital age. The way governments have decided that having a website accessible in a country makes you

• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• javagram 7y ago
  Just block your website from being accessed in any country where you aren’t sure you can comply with their laws. A lot of sites are doing that for GDPR.
  • dantheman 7y ago
    The country can choose the block the website. Why should you have to do it?
  • elondaits 7y ago
    The GDPR only applies to websites / companies that either have offices / legal status in a european country or that specifically target / sell to europeans (e.g. they place ads in Europe, ship merchandise to Europe, etc.). You don't need to block european countries if you have no business or interest there.
    • tzs 7y ago
      It also applies to sites not in the Union if their processing activities are related to "the monitoring of their behaviour as far as their behaviour takes place within the Union". (Article 3 section 2(b)). Unlike the target/sell case, this doesn't seem to require intent to specifically deal with Europeans. If you aren't sure that what you do doesn't count as monitoring behavior, then blocking can make sense.
• FussyZeus 7y ago
  > We need to have a conversation about jurisdictions in the digital age. The way governments have decided that having a website accessible in a country makes you liable to respect the law of this country is a convulted and hacky notion that has been accepted way too fast. You know if you turn that around and say "How come we have to respect the laws of every country we do business in?" it sounds a lot more self serving. Nobody said your website had to serve Californians. Nobody said your iPhone game has to be accessible in North Korea. Nobody said your movie has to be viewable in China. If you're intending to serve any product to an entire planet composed of nations, states, societies all pulling from different experiences, different cultural attitudes, I think expecting a completely friction-free experience in doing so is more than a little unreasonable. And more to the point that this particular discussion is about, these are principles that pretty much every society could reasonably get behind. Sorry that means mining data isn't a solid business model anymore, but I'm also not even remotely sorry. Adtech should die. It's a blight on our society.
  • ohduran 7y ago
    This. Imagine if you said the same thing with taxes. "Gee, why do I have to pay taxes differently in every country?" Well, because that's what you have to do if you want to do business there. You're not forced to do anything in here if you don't want to; if the opportunity is worthy, others will take your place. Same with the laws, especially those that remove agency from the users.
    • mjevans 7y ago
      The tax problem could be solved by requiring a shipping manifest, including declared value, and applying taxes at the shipping carrier level. This would make more sense anyway since the delivery carriers have to establish a physical presence.
      • dsfyu404ed 7y ago
        My machine tooling comes in little padded envelopes with standardized shipping labels that have the customs declaration info. They all say "phone accessories". If the origin country is not willing to track it back to the source and do enforcement for you and you don't want to categorically block or have invasive monitoring everything from that country then it's a fool's errand. The same goes for websites.
• exar0815 7y ago
  This is manifestly bullshit. When I as an Engineer build a physical product, I have to take care that it fulfills the legal and normative requirements of every place I plan to sell it. The product of a software company is said software. The "storefront" is their website. When I cater to a global audience, I have to make sure I fulfill all requirements. Period. No matter what I sell. Now, there are ways around it. Either agree on a supernational legal frame , for example a car which is certified in one EU-Country is deemed certified everywhere (something Tesla used to great effect) or have one reliable entity for certification (like the FAA was in Aerospace, which is most likely bound to change). But putting the onus on the customer to find the legalities in the origin country of the software/website provider is not the solution. Especially for large providers. Just an example question: Where is the website "legally" located? The company's HQ? The local office? The office of the developers? The main database? The CDN-Server for your location? edit:formatting/typos
  • throawayuk55po 7y ago
    Why do you have to respect national norms? Because there will be health and safety implications within their country. In the case of visiting a website, the customer is the one visiting you, there is no good rational to put the burden on the business. It is much more sound and natural to either put it on the consumer, a business may be visited by nationals from hundreds of juridisction, while a consumer will only visit 1 or 2 businesses. You can also decide that the laws of the country in which the business is based apply. You make it sound more difficult than it actually is, every website selling software products already mentions the address of the owner, at the very least to define a party for the contract / terms of service.
    • IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
      It's a myth that the internet is about "information" that has no power to do any harm. Anything that can be beneficial must, by definition, have the power to change whatever you consider reality, and almost that power can have negative consequences as well as positive ones. Here, we're talking data and privacy, and it's commonly accepted fact that the disclosure of personal data can be harmful. Countries want to protect their citizen from such harms. Hence regulation. > , there is no good rational to put the burden on the business. It is much more sound and natural to either put it on the consumer, a business may be visited by nationals from hundreds of juridisction, while a consumer will only visit 1 or 2 businesses This seems completely, and obviously, be the opposite of reality as I experience it, as both a consumer and startup founder. Businesses have repeated transactions of similar types and products. Since there are fewer businesses than consumers, they also have more resources, and locating any burdens of transactions that occur once per country is vastly more efficient. A company like Facebook has a theoretical upper limit of a little less than 200 jurisdictions to consider, using billions in revenue. Their customers would have to the same, only they number in the billions, and have few resources nor structures for sharing this burden (except, of course, their governments). > while a consumer will only visit 1 or 2 businesses. I'm pretty sure I interact with dozens of businesses every day.
• criddell 7y ago
  > Can you imagine owning a grocery store and having to ask every customer their nationality For privacy matters it's easy though. The UN has declared that privacy is a human right for all humans in all countries.
  • ohduran 7y ago
    The UN has no way to enforce anything. It comes down to individual countries in the end, and sometimes that's too general.
    • criddell 7y ago
      Sure, but the valley companies in the article (and their employees) wouldn't be afraid if they didn't routinely engage in human rights violations.
• ssivark 7y ago
  A natural consequence of your suggestion would be the legislative/EULA analogue of "tax inversion", whereby major companies would move "physical presence" (for some technical definition) to a legislatively lax state/country, and states would have a race to the bottom to attract companies (like with tax benefits). While I understand your point about the impediments to unfettered interaction, this seems to me to be a fundamental problem with "globalized" interactions where the different parties to a transaction expect to be governed by different laws. > Can you imagine owning a grocery store and having to ask every customer their nationality to check which law you must follow to do business with them? It is, unfortunately, a little too easy, to implement filters based on whitelists/blacklists at the DNS level, since those are largely organized geographically (proximity by packet travel time, and what not)
• zapnuk 7y ago
  > Can you imagine owning a grocery store and having to ask every customer their nationality to check which law you must follow to do business with them? Thats a bad metaphor. If you open a grocery store in one country you follow the relevant law of said country. If you extend you business to another country the new store has to follow the law of the other country. The problem with physical establishment is that it could create a 'race to the bottom', similar to tax laws. With non-tangible elements like privacy, what stops big players like the USA to implement weak privacy protections to get a competitive edge?
• purple_ducks 7y ago
  > Can you imagine owning a grocery store and having to ask every customer their nationality to check which law you must follow to do business with them Can you imagine a grocery chain who wants to profit from potential customers all over the world but doesn't want to obey local laws in the jurisdictions it operates in? If people don't want to serve people outside their jurisdiction, do an IP lookup as some US outlets chose to do. Hacky US start-ups don't get to dictate the rules of the game to the world.
  • gedy 7y ago
    It's more like an international customer calling a US business on the telephone and placing an order. That's not 'serving outside their jurisdiction'.
    • SolaceQuantum 7y ago
      I mean... An international customer can call a US business to place an order, that doesn't mean the US business needs to follow through with or accept this order. Lots of US small businesses I know about don't serve international markets in the hobbyist circles I come from, even though they most definitely have demand there.
    • noodlesUK 7y ago
      Yeah, and you know what, if I called Walmart and tried to buy half the groceries they sell to then resell to UK customers, I’d probably end up paying massive fines or even in prison. I can’t source products that don’t comply with the law, even if they are legal where I bought them. I can probably get away with it for personal use, but there isn’t free movement of goods like that.
  • hartator 7y ago
    > If people don't want to serve people outside their jurisdiction, do an IP lookup as some US outlets chose to do. Are you sure your comment you've just made comply with the law of all the 200 countries in the world?
• GhettoMaestro 7y ago
  Sorry - you aren't going to win this one. Your argument essentially boils down to "I'm too lazy to do proper business compliance, therefore your rules should be invalidated."
• citilife 7y ago
  My favorite example is: If a purchaser calls a suppler from state Y from state X and ask to buy something. Which laws do I follow? * The purchaser follow laws from state X * The supplier from state follows laws from state Y * We then pay any duties to ship from state Y to state X This is the way things have been done, since, well... forever. No one thinks it's weird if this kind of business is conducted in person or over the phone. Now, with the internet - it's believed that the supplier must now take on the burden of knowing the laws for purchaser - that's kind of strange. The supplier is not operating in country X, so it probably wont be punished by country X. Anyway, as a developer and maintainer of making a fair amount of cross boarder trade. I host my servers in one location, the state in which I operate. Good luck punishing me. The reality is that my only burden is the state in which I operate, otherwise we're interfering with the sovereignty of the state in which I reside... don't think they'll like that. Good luck challenging that one.
  • munchbunny 7y ago
    > The reality is that my only burden is the state in which I operate, otherwise we're interfering with the sovereignty of the state in which I reside... don't think they'll like that. Good luck challenging that one. I mean, that's exactly what's going on. You can choose to follow State Y's laws when serving customers in State Y, or you can choose to not serve customers in State Y. But if you choose to not follow State Y's laws while serving customers in State Y, then State Y can use whatever leverage they can get their hands on to keep you out of State Y. That's State Y flexing their own sovereignty when it comes to protecting their citizens, which is the flipside of your argument about your state protecting you.
  • cmroanirgo 7y ago
    I'd suggest that in your example, the purchaser isn't having all details about himself being recorded and monetized by the supplier, just simply for contacting the supplier: no agreements of trade have been entered into, but even if they had, there's little cause for selling the information to other 3rd parties. Surely the purchaser has some rights to sovereignity?
  • IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
• xg15 7y ago
  So, out of couriosity, how would your alternative look? Anarcho-capitalism?
• hartator 7y ago
  Agreed. A good rule of thumb is the law applicable is where your HQ is located. Or you have to come up with good reasons why US companies shouldn't comply with the Chinese gov but should with EU ones.
  • lagadu 7y ago
    No company has to comply with laws of jurisdictions they're not based on. Unless they want to be allowed to conduct business there, that is.
• kelnos 7y ago
  Not sure why you think this is so odd. This is how interstate commerce has worked in the US long before the Internet came around. Mail- and phone-order businesses were (and are) required to obey the laws of the state they're shipping to. > The physical establishment rule was the only sound approach. The only reason that rule exists is because enforcement was much more difficult when your target doesn't have a physical establishment within your own borders. If you can enforce it for foreign entities (via some kind of side leverage, like a trade treaty, threat of sanctions, etc.), then, at face value, you should: why should the law behave differently based on physical presence? You yourself point out that things are different in the Internet age; that includes the acknowledgement that commerce can now trivially cross borders without having to have satellite offices everywhere.
• munchbunny 7y ago
  I heavily disagree that the physical establishment rule was the only sound approach. It's certainly a valid approach, but not the only sound approach. The problem with the physical establishment rule is that it leaves the end user with no leverage to actually protect themselves or their data. The EU and California taking a stance that you must obey their data handling rules in order to do business there is a direct result of the lack of a robust system between states and nations to give users the ability to control their own data when the company's physical establishment is in a different legal system. This approach is the most immediately practical one: I vote for the politician who is willing to enact laws that actually have teeth to regulate the use of my data. The industry has certainly shown a lack of desire to put teeth into any sort of self-regulation. I worked in ad tech - that industry standard body (the IAB) pretended to care at best, and actively lobbied to erode privacy rights most of the time. Real privacy enforcement mechanisms that actually respected users only started to show up once the GDPR boogeyman showed up. At the time when we were generally happy with the physical establishment rule, the set of problems we were dealing with was very different. We were more worried about individual freedom in terms of access to services and communications, not individual freedom in terms of safety from bad actors.
• deleted 7y ago
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• buboard 7y ago
  Either jurisdictions will expand to include the entirety of the planet, or they will be abolished.