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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 yo

> 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.
  - chroma 7y ago
    It's absurdly easy to get around these laws. For example: I had a motherboard shipped from China a few months ago. The shipper lied on manifest and claimed he was sending the motherboard back to me after repairing it. Neither the US government nor China got any duties or taxes on that shipment. Lying on manifests also lets people import quasi-legal things such as cell phone jammers. The manifest will usually say something like "laser pointer" or "wifi repeater".
- wolco 7y ago
  But you don't. If I am from South Africa and I buy a US product from a smaller website I don't pay South Africa sales taxes. If I buy from Amazon I would because they have offices or a physical presence. When you buy a product from a website hosted/incorporated in a different country you are literally going into another country and buying a product under their laws. Your local taxes (national/stat wide/city wide) shouldn't matter and don't. The same should apply for eu privacy law.
  - noodlesUK 7y ago
    If this is your experience buying things internationally from smaller websites, that surprises me greatly. When I purchase items from US retailers in European countries, before the item arrives, I get a little slip to pay the duties on the item. If I don’t pay, the item doesn’t arrive.
    - wolco 7y ago
      Duty is imposed at the country level. In my country things we make have additional duty but products we don't are not. I would assume importing milk might trigger 50% duty but receiving a dnakit from 23andme wouldn't.
      - noodlesUK 7y ago
        My experience has been that I need to pay VAT, as well as any specific duties for the category of item I’m bringing in. This can be a lot, as VAT is currently 20%. I’m okay with it though. Any item I buy locally have VAT, and I think it’s unfair if you don’t charge that on imports. It’s the beauty of a VAT that it won’t hurt production if you’re reselling the goods anyway.
      - diffeomorphism 7y ago
        No, you and the sellers are just committing tax fraud at a small enough level that nobody cares: https://www.sars.gov.za/ClientSegments/Customs-Excise/DutiesTaxes/Pages/Duties-and-Taxes-for-Importers-.aspx https://www.sars.gov.za/ClientSegments/Customs-Excise/Duties... Amazon is too large to get away with that and hence charges you sales tax. The "small shops" can get away with it, but it is still illegal.
fennecfoxen 7y ago
> Nobody said your movie has to be viewable in China. You will of course forgive me if I do not find economic favoritism that benefits politically connected industrialists, the restriction of freedom of thought by oppressive governments, and the general Balkanization of the Internet, to be things that we ought to celebrate. Once upon a time the memes of Internet culture would suggest that "information wants to be free!" Oh, sweet halcyon days of yore!
- jakelazaroff 7y ago
  > Once upon a time the memes of Internet culture would suggest that "information wants to be free!" Oh, sweet halcyon days of yore! Turns out it’s not free — it’s actually very valuable, and the cost is borne by society writ large.
  - alanbernstein 7y ago
    Information does want to be libre. Information is not gratis.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > Once upon a time the memes of Internet culture would suggest that "information wants to be free!" Oh, sweet halcyon days of yore! Agreed. But martech pretty much killed that dead.
- pgcj_poster 7y ago
  All of these argument apply to national sovereignty in general. When different countries can have different laws, it does indeed mean that France can have tax laws favoring French companies, a US company might have a harder time setting up shop in Germany, and North Korea can oppress its people with impunity.
throawayuk55po 7y ago
We need a principle-based approach, sound societies can only be built with sound principles. If I have interesting ideas, I could write a book and sell it in every country of the world. Then this product would be taxed and would need to respect the publication-related laws of that country. On the other hand, if someone reads my book and then travels across the country to hold free seminaries to teach my ideas to the masses, it is not reasonable to try to tax this value transfer, but this is exactly what governments have decided to do. You see: values vs principles. We can have values but we need to articulate sound principles to give life to these values. What you describe are values. And what I contend is that we already had sound principles, principles developed across decades and even centuries. The physican establishment rule is the only sound and workable principle. What we have now is a mess encouraging anti-democratic dynamics (centralization, fingerprinting, and ironically data collection since you need to know more about consumers to know how to apply the laws), in addition preventing innovation and making business difficult. All of this while for every non-taxed value under traditional principles, a taxable value is actually created... but for some reason nobody is interested in investigating this correlation... for example, the person holding seminaries pays a tax on the room he rents for the seminary. But government prefer to go hard on their propaganda. If a country wants to tax the books royalty, it should focus on upping its game to attract intellectuals instead of hacking together unsustainable notions to tax "learning". Similar things could be said for advertising company. When an advertiser advertises in a country, it is by definition to sell a product that most of the time will be taxed into the country (and even if it doesn't, this value transfer will at the 2nd or 3rd degree lead to an activity that can be taxed). This is why principles based on physical presence and not abstract fictions are not only sufficient and sound but they are also fair. The same is true for privacy, which are after all transactions of their own kind. If you want to regulate data, make sure people use services based in your country by creating the proper environment instead of hacking together extraterritorial laws based on wacky principles. Just compare these new frameworks, with the readability of the physical establishment principles, that been able to accomodate even the most complex business models for centuries. Principles should be a foundation, not something you throw out of the window as soon as you start losing to avoid confronting your difficult challenges at the cost of creating an international mess. Digital is not complex, and does not require complex regulations. Trying not to adapt to the world and not to confront your true problems is the only that is complex.
tchock23 7y ago
Not everyone has data mining and adtech as a business model. Why should people running legit online businesses that do not involve mining data be punished for unscrupulous actors in the adtech biz?
- baq 7y ago
  how do you suggest to solve the adtech situation without regulating all businesses?
  - tchock23 7y ago
    Not really sure how - just posing that as an ideal for not punishing those who do not have that business model. I suppose the regulation could be on the subsequent sharing/sale of user data upon capturing it, rather than the initial data collection?
xwdv 7y ago
You are dead wrong. A completely friction free experience is exactly what you should expect. Every political obstacle we create for data traveling through wires undermines the entire point of having an internet, and cedes more power to legislating bodies who are clueless about technology. An individual should be empowered to serve data to another individual anywhere in the globe without barriers, period. If people can’t get behind that idea, then just get the fuck out of the way.
- ubercow13 7y ago
  Isn’t this just anarchism?
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    In the same sense as "Lawerence vs Texas" is anarchism of the bedroom. "If it is between two parties why is it anyone else's business?" as the default assumption instead of coversheet on your TPS report regulations as default.
c3534l 7y ago
The problem is that both views are essentially correct. The business is located in one country, but the customers can be in any country, and customers are not really entering another country and the businesses are kind of, but not really doing business "in" another country, to the extent that they know what country they're doing business in at all. We're still at that stage in the computer of using physical analogies to reason about how things "should be" even though those metaphores don't really work anymore.
danShumway 7y ago
As a user, I want to be able to access any website online without providing them my location data (even approximate). As a user, I want to be able to pay or donate to a company or individual without providing them my identity or location data. This is already an extremely hard thing to do because of tax laws like VAT. Please don't make it harder for me. As an activist, I want everyone to use technology that by-default masks their physical location from websites they access. I want them to feel free not to provide their physical location to anyone online, including businesses like Facebook. As an activist, I want the majority of popular online payment systems to avoid revealing a buyer's physical location by default, and I want users to feel free to not provide their physical location when paying for a digital product or giving money to another individual. This is already a (nearly) impossible goal because of the sheer amount of tax and money-laundering laws that need to be addressed first. Please don't make it harder. Laws that force websites to geo-lock based on consumer location are going to be (in the long run) bad for privacy and bad for the open Internet. I don't care about what businesses do or don't want, but the strategies we use to take down advertisers and data-hungry corporations matter. My less-charitable reading of this situation is that people are generally fine with using user-location as an indicator of jurisdiction because the laws working on that principle are primarily pro-privacy right now. If these laws were being passed in other areas, I wonder if people would be more nervous about the precedent they set.
kansface 7y ago
The GDPR doesn’t apply to European IPs, it applies to Europeans. It would be like a French guy showing up at the grocery store you run and now you have to obey EU regulations or be subject to massive fines. Also, half of the grocery stores in the US now flat out refuse to do business with the French, or any American expatriates. The other half make people with French accents fill out a disclaimer form before they can enter which is also somehow against EU regulations in some cases... but it’s mostly OK for now, because the law weirdly seems to only be enforced against large US multinational food chain suppliers who were able to out compete local French companies. To top it everyone thinks this was such a success that they are racing to pile on with California leading the charge.
- im3w1l 7y ago
  This happens with brick-and-mortar banks already. They will ask "Are you an American citizen?" and then follow up with "Sorry FATCA is too complicated, can't serve you".
opportune 7y ago
The issue is that with the internet, the default option is “available everywhere” whereas basically any other commercial thing is only available in a physical location, because that’s where the good is being sold/ the service is being offered. The main thing similar to tech is media, but even if someone in a country where some media content is banned is caught consuming that media, the consumer is punished rather than the producer. I am actually in favor of privacy regulations. But there are two major issues that most people don’t understand - Compliance is not easy if you do anything much more complicated than serve a static website. Basically anything business related will have PII. And you can introduce PII accidentally with things like logging, putting it in places it shouldn’t be - Because the internet is open by default you need to comply with basically every single regulation on the planet, and the burden is fully on you to know how and why you comply with those regulations. (Some places will just firewall you, which in many ways is better, but others just want to make money off you)
- flukus 7y ago
  > The issue is that with the internet, the default option is “available everywhere” This is very often not true. A generic website will be visible everywhere, but new online stores will typically sell domestically only by default and may expand later. Even tech giants like google will roll out services to US customers first, like when they launched the play store. Amazon in Australia is nearly unheard of, not ubiquitous like they seem to be in the US. It took netflix a decade to start here. The internet is not as universal as you think.
baddox 7y ago
> 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. Is it so unreasonable? Given that the Internet essentially solves the problem of technically doing this, perhaps it is in fact the laws which are unreasonable. Your statement isn't so different from saying "it's unreasonable to expect to be able to have a nearly-instant audio conversation with virtually anyone on the planet for very little cost." I would give the same response: that no, that's really not that unreasonable given that the technical problems are essentially solved, and if there are laws preventing that, perhaps the laws are unreasonable.

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.
- chroma 7y ago
  It's absurdly easy to get around these laws. For example: I had a motherboard shipped from China a few months ago. The shipper lied on manifest and claimed he was sending the motherboard back to me after repairing it. Neither the US government nor China got any duties or taxes on that shipment. Lying on manifests also lets people import quasi-legal things such as cell phone jammers. The manifest will usually say something like "laser pointer" or "wifi repeater".
wolco 7y ago
But you don't. If I am from South Africa and I buy a US product from a smaller website I don't pay South Africa sales taxes. If I buy from Amazon I would because they have offices or a physical presence. When you buy a product from a website hosted/incorporated in a different country you are literally going into another country and buying a product under their laws. Your local taxes (national/stat wide/city wide) shouldn't matter and don't. The same should apply for eu privacy law.
- noodlesUK 7y ago
  If this is your experience buying things internationally from smaller websites, that surprises me greatly. When I purchase items from US retailers in European countries, before the item arrives, I get a little slip to pay the duties on the item. If I don’t pay, the item doesn’t arrive.
  - wolco 7y ago
    Duty is imposed at the country level. In my country things we make have additional duty but products we don't are not. I would assume importing milk might trigger 50% duty but receiving a dnakit from 23andme wouldn't.
    - noodlesUK 7y ago
      My experience has been that I need to pay VAT, as well as any specific duties for the category of item I’m bringing in. This can be a lot, as VAT is currently 20%. I’m okay with it though. Any item I buy locally have VAT, and I think it’s unfair if you don’t charge that on imports. It’s the beauty of a VAT that it won’t hurt production if you’re reselling the goods anyway.
    - diffeomorphism 7y ago
      No, you and the sellers are just committing tax fraud at a small enough level that nobody cares: https://www.sars.gov.za/ClientSegments/Customs-Excise/DutiesTaxes/Pages/Duties-and-Taxes-for-Importers-.aspx https://www.sars.gov.za/ClientSegments/Customs-Excise/Duties... Amazon is too large to get away with that and hence charges you sales tax. The "small shops" can get away with it, but it is still illegal.

fennecfoxen 7y ago

> Nobody said your movie has to be viewable in China. You will of course forgive me if I do not find economic favoritism that benefits politically connected industrialists, the restriction of freedom of thought by oppressive governments, and the general Balkanization of the Internet, to be things that we ought to celebrate. Once upon a time the memes of Internet culture would suggest that "information wants to be free!" Oh, sweet halcyon days of yore!

jakelazaroff 7y ago
> Once upon a time the memes of Internet culture would suggest that "information wants to be free!" Oh, sweet halcyon days of yore! Turns out it’s not free — it’s actually very valuable, and the cost is borne by society writ large.
- alanbernstein 7y ago
  Information does want to be libre. Information is not gratis.
JohnFen 7y ago
> Once upon a time the memes of Internet culture would suggest that "information wants to be free!" Oh, sweet halcyon days of yore! Agreed. But martech pretty much killed that dead.
pgcj_poster 7y ago
All of these argument apply to national sovereignty in general. When different countries can have different laws, it does indeed mean that France can have tax laws favoring French companies, a US company might have a harder time setting up shop in Germany, and North Korea can oppress its people with impunity.

throawayuk55po 7y ago

We need a principle-based approach, sound societies can only be built with sound principles. If I have interesting ideas, I could write a book and sell it in every country of the world. Then this product would be taxed and would need to respect the publication-related laws of that country. On the other hand, if someone reads my book and then travels across the country to hold free seminaries to teach my ideas to the masses, it is not reasonable to try to tax this value transfer, but this is exactly what governments have decided to do. You see: values vs principles. We can have values but we need to articulate sound principles to give life to these values. What you describe are values. And what I contend is that we already had sound principles, principles developed across decades and even centuries. The physican establishment rule is the only sound and workable principle. What we have now is a mess encouraging anti-democratic dynamics (centralization, fingerprinting, and ironically data collection since you need to know more about consumers to know how to apply the laws), in addition preventing innovation and making business difficult. All of this while for every non-taxed value under traditional principles, a taxable value is actually created... but for some reason nobody is interested in investigating this correlation... for example, the person holding seminaries pays a tax on the room he rents for the seminary. But government prefer to go hard on their propaganda. If a country wants to tax the books royalty, it should focus on upping its game to attract intellectuals instead of hacking together unsustainable notions to tax "learning". Similar things could be said for advertising company. When an advertiser advertises in a country, it is by definition to sell a product that most of the time will be taxed into the country (and even if it doesn't, this value transfer will at the 2nd or 3rd degree lead to an activity that can be taxed). This is why principles based on physical presence and not abstract fictions are not only sufficient and sound but they are also fair. The same is true for privacy, which are after all transactions of their own kind. If you want to regulate data, make sure people use services based in your country by creating the proper environment instead of hacking together extraterritorial laws based on wacky principles. Just compare these new frameworks, with the readability of the physical establishment principles, that been able to accomodate even the most complex business models for centuries. Principles should be a foundation, not something you throw out of the window as soon as you start losing to avoid confronting your difficult challenges at the cost of creating an international mess. Digital is not complex, and does not require complex regulations. Trying not to adapt to the world and not to confront your true problems is the only that is complex.

tchock23 7y ago

Not everyone has data mining and adtech as a business model. Why should people running legit online businesses that do not involve mining data be punished for unscrupulous actors in the adtech biz?

baq 7y ago
how do you suggest to solve the adtech situation without regulating all businesses?
- tchock23 7y ago
  Not really sure how - just posing that as an ideal for not punishing those who do not have that business model. I suppose the regulation could be on the subsequent sharing/sale of user data upon capturing it, rather than the initial data collection?

xwdv 7y ago

You are dead wrong. A completely friction free experience is exactly what you should expect. Every political obstacle we create for data traveling through wires undermines the entire point of having an internet, and cedes more power to legislating bodies who are clueless about technology. An individual should be empowered to serve data to another individual anywhere in the globe without barriers, period. If people can’t get behind that idea, then just get the fuck out of the way.

ubercow13 7y ago
Isn’t this just anarchism?
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  In the same sense as "Lawerence vs Texas" is anarchism of the bedroom. "If it is between two parties why is it anyone else's business?" as the default assumption instead of coversheet on your TPS report regulations as default.

c3534l 7y ago

The problem is that both views are essentially correct. The business is located in one country, but the customers can be in any country, and customers are not really entering another country and the businesses are kind of, but not really doing business "in" another country, to the extent that they know what country they're doing business in at all. We're still at that stage in the computer of using physical analogies to reason about how things "should be" even though those metaphores don't really work anymore.

danShumway 7y ago

As a user, I want to be able to access any website online without providing them my location data (even approximate). As a user, I want to be able to pay or donate to a company or individual without providing them my identity or location data. This is already an extremely hard thing to do because of tax laws like VAT. Please don't make it harder for me. As an activist, I want everyone to use technology that by-default masks their physical location from websites they access. I want them to feel free not to provide their physical location to anyone online, including businesses like Facebook. As an activist, I want the majority of popular online payment systems to avoid revealing a buyer's physical location by default, and I want users to feel free to not provide their physical location when paying for a digital product or giving money to another individual. This is already a (nearly) impossible goal because of the sheer amount of tax and money-laundering laws that need to be addressed first. Please don't make it harder. Laws that force websites to geo-lock based on consumer location are going to be (in the long run) bad for privacy and bad for the open Internet. I don't care about what businesses do or don't want, but the strategies we use to take down advertisers and data-hungry corporations matter. My less-charitable reading of this situation is that people are generally fine with using user-location as an indicator of jurisdiction because the laws working on that principle are primarily pro-privacy right now. If these laws were being passed in other areas, I wonder if people would be more nervous about the precedent they set.

kansface 7y ago

The GDPR doesn’t apply to European IPs, it applies to Europeans. It would be like a French guy showing up at the grocery store you run and now you have to obey EU regulations or be subject to massive fines. Also, half of the grocery stores in the US now flat out refuse to do business with the French, or any American expatriates. The other half make people with French accents fill out a disclaimer form before they can enter which is also somehow against EU regulations in some cases... but it’s mostly OK for now, because the law weirdly seems to only be enforced against large US multinational food chain suppliers who were able to out compete local French companies. To top it everyone thinks this was such a success that they are racing to pile on with California leading the charge.

im3w1l 7y ago
This happens with brick-and-mortar banks already. They will ask "Are you an American citizen?" and then follow up with "Sorry FATCA is too complicated, can't serve you".

opportune 7y ago

The issue is that with the internet, the default option is “available everywhere” whereas basically any other commercial thing is only available in a physical location, because that’s where the good is being sold/ the service is being offered. The main thing similar to tech is media, but even if someone in a country where some media content is banned is caught consuming that media, the consumer is punished rather than the producer. I am actually in favor of privacy regulations. But there are two major issues that most people don’t understand - Compliance is not easy if you do anything much more complicated than serve a static website. Basically anything business related will have PII. And you can introduce PII accidentally with things like logging, putting it in places it shouldn’t be - Because the internet is open by default you need to comply with basically every single regulation on the planet, and the burden is fully on you to know how and why you comply with those regulations. (Some places will just firewall you, which in many ways is better, but others just want to make money off you)

flukus 7y ago
> The issue is that with the internet, the default option is “available everywhere” This is very often not true. A generic website will be visible everywhere, but new online stores will typically sell domestically only by default and may expand later. Even tech giants like google will roll out services to US customers first, like when they launched the play store. Amazon in Australia is nearly unheard of, not ubiquitous like they seem to be in the US. It took netflix a decade to start here. The internet is not as universal as you think.

baddox 7y ago

> 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. Is it so unreasonable? Given that the Internet essentially solves the problem of technically doing this, perhaps it is in fact the laws which are unreasonable. Your statement isn't so different from saying "it's unreasonable to expect to be able to have a nearly-instant audio conversation with virtually anyone on the planet for very little cost." I would give the same response: that no, that's really not that unreasonable given that the technical problems are essentially solved, and if there are laws preventing that, perhaps the laws are unreasonable.