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You are absolutely fragmenting the internet. We had PII on Azure. We wanted to do business in France. We had to fork our services, and run a full stack on a
by VikingCoder 5y ago
You are absolutely fragmenting the internet.
We had PII on Azure. We wanted to do business in France. We had to fork our services, and run a full stack on a crappy provider in France. They charged a lot more, would take weeks of vacation with zero support for us. It was a freaking nightmare.
EDIT: I love the responses I'm getting. People are in absolute denial that this does in fact fragment the internet. You may believe that's a good thing, and that's a rational discussion we can have. But don't lie to yourself, or to me, that this doesn't fragment the internet.
- 0des 5y agodésolé!
- benreesman 5y agoJe suis un homme occupé, et te faire passer pour une risée peut prendre du temps, mais tout le monde a besoin d'un passe-temps.
- anothernewdude 5y agoSo pass the cost of doing business in France on to the french.
- richardfey 5y agoThe fragmentation is acceptable since the alternative for non-US citizens is to be treated as "free game"?
- nickpp 5y ago
- malermeister 5y agoThe solution to this is to get your government to get its shit together on privacy. This is just a defensive act by the Europeans and to blame it on them is victim blaming.
- mping 5y agoThis completely misses the point, the laws shouldn't be written to accommodate businesses, its the other way around. If fragmenting is a consequence of better privacy laws, so be it.
- nickpp 5y agoBusinesses exists for consumers. Fragmenting hurts people - European users - in the first place. I see very little advantages from these privacy laws but I use and appreciate US businesses every day.
- aksss 5y agoWhat, you don't appreciate a pop-up on every web page telling you that cookies are going to be used? XD
- lillecarl 5y agoThe cookie banners are a byproduct of companies still wanting to abuse your data, when was the last time you saw a cookie pop-up on HN? Logged in or not.
- VikingCoder 5y agoIf only there were some way that European citizens could have told their browsers to not accept Cookies, then maybe we all wouldn't have to click on those banners all the damn time.
- Dylan16807 5y agoBut I do want most non-tracking cookies. Still, the "please let us track" popups can be fixed by policy or law, and I hope they are.
- Nullabillity 5y agoSo if those businesses utterly refuse to serve consumers then they have no business existing?
- rightbyte 5y ago> would take weeks of vacation with zero support for us Heh. Somethings tells me a devops engineer in France has way better work-life balance.
- VikingCoder 5y agoYou'd think a _team_ of them could provide 8/5 (8 hours a day, 5 days a week) service...
- __MatrixMan__ 5y agoThe internet was designed to be resilient in the face of nuclear war. If it can't handle governments that actually protect their citizens from predation by multinational corporations, then we should rethink some things about the direction that we've taken with it.
- gjs278 5y ago
- VikingCoder 5y agoSure, so, let's say that France decides that HN info is PII. So then Hacker News has to launch servers in France. And then French HN users are in an island, and only see other French HN users' posts and comments. And, to be clear, you think that's a good thing?
- kyletns 5y agoDo you think it would be difficult to allow the different HN servers to federate their content across regions?
- VikingCoder 5y agoIn what way is a French resident protected if their data is stored on a server in France but can be federated to other countries?
- jonas21 5y agoWould it be impossible? No. But would it be, say, 5x the amount of effort to build and maintain a federated system with no data stored across boundaries? Probably.
- esyir 5y agoDifficult? Not so much. Demanding a yet another great firewall on the other hand sounds absolutely atrocious to me.
- 5y ago
- javajosh 5y agoThere is so much I want to say about this comment! First of all, it sounds like you had a terrible experience because you picked a bad ISP. I sympathize. But then you generalize from that and imply that anyone wanting an EU host will experience the same. Obviously that's not true - or do you believe no good ISPs exist in France? Second of all, why did you fork your code? Did you write your service to use proprietary Azure APIs without regard to vendor lock-in? Why not take this as an opportunity to incrementally extract the proprietary apis out of your application and replace them with processes you actually own? This will allow you to undo the fork and continue on, able to deploy your application anywhere you want.
- VikingCoder 5y agoWe did our research, and settled on the French cloud provider that fit our parameters. They made promises about support hours that they did not keep. Changing cloud service providers is not cheap. We were a small team, and this cost us lots of effort. We didn't fork our code, we forked our services. We ran everything on Azure. Then we had to configure our kiosk devices to either talk to Azure, or to talk to our servers in France. "Did you write your service to use proprietary Azure APIs without regard to vendor lock-in? Why not take this as an opportunity" I'm sorry, do you have any idea of the cost of doing these things? If you have 6 developers, total, how many of them are you willing to allocate to rewriting your stack, so that you can sell your product in Europe?
- cpeterso 5y agoDo cloud service providers like Azure not have a way to "pin" some of your service instances to servers in specific countries? Seems like this capability would be important differentiating feature given EU privacy laws about where user data is hosted.
- seszett 5y agoThey do, in fact Azure is totally compatible with French law for handling private data. Many large companies use it.
- na85 5y agoSounds like the market in france is ripe for disruption.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- titzer 5y ago> You are absolutely fragmenting the internet. It's not fragmenting the internet; fragmentation is the whole point of the internet. It's (re-)decentralizing something that has been decentralized the whole time, until these gluttonous whales decided try to eat the whole pie.
- VikingCoder 5y agoSo a computer in France can not legally talk to a computer in the United States, but if I instead put that computer in France, I'm legally okay. And you're convinced that embodies "the whole point of the internet"?
- titzer 5y agoIt isn't about "one computer talking to another", it's about where sensitive information is stored. It has never been legal to store classified US intelligence on computers outside of the control of the US government. That's an extreme example, but the handling of many types of information is prescribed by laws in different jurisdictions. Does that mean that US computers cannot "talk" to another other computers? No. Does that make the internet invalid? No. Decentralization of the cloud is a good thing for so many reasons. I think you're deliberately confusing it with your PII issues and not grasping the larger picture.
- VikingCoder 5y agoI think you're ignoring the harm done to small businesses who cannot afford to implement decentralized services. You are raising the barrier to entry, limiting competition. Competition is good for so many reasons. I think you're deliberately ignoring the impact on small companies and not grasping the larger picture.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y agoThose poor small international businesses? If you want to do business internationally, it'll be complicated, and that's fine. The internet has spoiled us by making it so easy for a while.
- karmelapple 5y agoQuick question: was there a reason you could not use Azure’s region support? https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/geographies/#geographies https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/geog... Or was it before Azure had that? Looks like they’ve had it for awhile, at least back to 2009 or 2010.
- VikingCoder 5y agoFrance, Year Opened 2018, is what I see on that page. This was impacting us in 2014 to 2016, as I remember.
- PeterisP 5y agoHowever all the GDPR requirements entered into force just in may 2018? But in any case, the point is that the issue is solved without changing the laws or people having to switch cloud providers, as simply the global cloud providers have started offering compliant services.
- Ruphin 5y agoLooks to me like the regulations did exactly what they were designed to do, and Azure implemented support for the EU market. The goal of these regulations is not to make things harder for companies trying to publish products in different regions, the goal is to get the big platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) to implement systems that are in line with EU privacy requirements. I'm sorry your business was impacted during the period where the regulations came into effect and the big platforms did not have compliant services ready. It would have been better if the negative externalities of these regulations would be entirely carried by the big platforms who are responsible for consumer privacy in the first place.
- unknown2374 5y agoYou do realize by the same logic this inspires competitors to innovate...
- forty 5y agoAgreed. But the internet is already fragmented. Each countries have their own laws and other countries no reason to follow them. All kind of content is accessible only in certain countries. It's also true for physical goods. I'm not sure why it's a problem.
- miohtama 5y agoMicrosoft has set up a fully independent data center and business in German just because of this: https://news.microsoft.com/europe/2020/09/30/our-commitment-to-delivering-the-microsoft-cloud-in-germany/ https://news.microsoft.com/europe/2020/09/30/our-commitment-...
- VikingCoder 5y agoUnfortunately, that didn't exist for us back in 2016, and our product is no longer in development.
- teddyh 5y agoSo your argument is out of date and no longer valid.
- VikingCoder 5y agoRight. All I have to do is to stand up two complete copies of my full stack, and support both of them. There's no way that adds extra burden to me. My argument is completely invalid. Thanks for explaining that to me.
- nickforr 5y agoIf you want to sell in two different countries don’t you have to comply with two different legal codes and support both of them?
- jdrc 5y ago
- noitpmeder 5y agoThe purpose of laws is to protect and govern their local citizens. I would hate to live in a world where a law does not get passed because of an argument like "but imagine how much work developers will have to do to follow the law!"
- 6510 5y agoI feel your pain but as an argument in this discussion it doesn't work. Your problem was in 2014 and Azure works just fine now. It took some doing which was the whole point. The local provider even got a chance to match the offer.
- belorn 5y agoIts very interesting if limiting how companies are allowed to track, store and sell private information would be the central issue for which the internet will fragment around. It almost like tracking, storing and selling is the center of the modern Internet, rather than protocols like tcp, upd, https and so on. In the past people said that the Internet was made for porn. Today the Internet is seemingly made for advertisement and surveillance. It not strange that so many people who worked in this industry for decades are feeling a bit lost in this new horrifying industry, which if the Internet really is made only to do advertisement and surveillance, I honestly think humanity is better off without it.
- VikingCoder 5y agoThe internet is a tool. You should support companies with the best behavior. I worked at a company that enabled a radiologist in over country to do a preliminary read of a CT scan performed in another country. Cutting the amount of time for a CT scan, and even connecting a CT scan with a radiologist who specialized in that particular kind of scan, we saved lives. And yes, there's also furry porn. It's a tool. I feel like I'm trying to convince you that BOOKS are good, despite the existence of hentai.
- belorn 5y agoCould that company exist if it wasn't allow to use advertisement or sell private information? In the past I would say yes without question since there is nothing inherently in connecting a CT scan with a radiologist specialist that require Google Analytics. Nothing at all.
- dspillett 5y ago> We had PII on Azure. So why didn't you use Azure resources in Europe instead of "some crappy provider"? Sounds like you made a rod for your own back. If our clients are happy with Azure (in the right region) then I can't imagine many in the EU (other than perhaps national security services and their suppliers) reasonably refusing to allow use of it. We host in Azure for some pretty significant financial organisations, mostly UK based but spreading our area. Some companies are requiring us to fully host in Azure DCs in their region, and some of those are Eastern, not UK/EU, based companies. At least one US interest that a friend's employer supplies demands data about its employees be hosted over there rather than over here, presumably so they can be assured it is kept to standards they are locally required to follow. Is it wrong that way around in your book too? It isn't as easy as having everything in one region of course, but not much harder nor massively more expensive (caveat: most likely, as far as I know, I have the luxury of ignoring the bits that don't interest me and money is often one of those things, but I'm also senior enough that if there was something expensive happening, or something not happening due to expense, I'd catch wind as it would affect things I need to plan around) and it can't be as faffy/costly as using different providers in each territory. If you are correctly following relevant regulations everywhere this does not fragment things any more than other rules that already existed. Aside from the fact things are being enforced this time, forcing companies handling PII to not quietly do things wrong because it is inconvenient to do things right. As an individual I'm perfectly fine with this.
- ghostoftesla 5y agocompany stooge.