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So 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 con

So 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 ago
It 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    Those 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.
    - VikingCoder 5y ago
      Seems like it doesn't bother you at all if this hurts competition. Or maybe you don't understand that by hurting competition, consumers are hurt? In our case, with a medical product, it was patients who were hurt.
      - 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
        It just shifts competition into new areas that are compliant with the law. If you can't use aws-us-east from france, then AWS is incentivized to build a (compliant) center in france or else lose that slice of the pie to the locals (or to a potential compliant azure center there). It's always a tradeoff between racing to the bottom and stagnating. Both are bad, both hurt consumers, and this seems like a good balance between them.
        VikingCoder 5y ago
        So eventually, we'll all just run a full copy of our stack in each of the 50 United States, plus the few extras for cities that have different laws, and then in each of the other 190 countries around the world? Does that seem like a good balance of needs to you?
        6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
        If that's what it takes to allow locals to govern themselves independently, sure. The technical difficulties seem so entirely solvable, in time (and with that competition you mentioned). Right now it's easy to deploy servers across tons of instances. In the future, if we need to, we can build analogous solutions to the problems you're talking about. And where we can't build our way to easy solutions, that's fine. Those cases are probably the ones where there are legitimate local differences in what's acceptable, and I want locals to be able to decide that for themselves. It's an absurd goal to try to make it easy for six engineers alone to scale to the entire planet.
        VikingCoder 5y ago
        > It's an absurd goal to try to make it easy for six engineers alone to scale to the entire planet. That's an interesting assertion. As counter-example to that assertion, [gestures at huge amounts of the internet as we know it, which was started by small teams.] And I'm not talking about scaling to 7 billion users. I'm talking about scaling to all of _my_ users, even though they live in dozens or hundreds of countries.
  - zekrioca 5y ago
    And I think your team did not think through before implementing your product. The GDPR and its consequences have been discussed for a very long time. And the product even managed to get locked into Azure.
    - VikingCoder 5y ago
      > a very long time What's a very long time to you might not be a very long time to me. GDPR wasn't a draft when the product I'm talking about first launched. The Azure offering did not exist when my small team needed it.
  - salawat 5y ago
    You're absolutely right. Unfortunately, the little guy is more easily accommodated for with lenoency during onboarding regulation-wise, and the bigger actors can never be brought to heel if something doesn't go down on paper.
zelphirkalt 5y ago
You are building up a whole strawman here. This is all about sending personal data to a machine in the US, owned by a company, which falls under US law. You don't have to send that personal data to the US, do you? Why would you do such a thing in the first place? Surely informed people would not simply consent to such a practice. And I mean informed. Not just clicking "OK OK next OK" without knowing what actually goes on, just to be able to see the actual content of a website.
- VikingCoder 5y ago
  It's not a strawman, it was the company I worked for. We helped manufacture medical devices. We sold a device that took medical images, and then sent the images to a server. The server would do tons of processing on the images, and help manufacture a medical device custom to the patient. We ran our servers in the United States. We could not sell our product in France, until we stood up servers in France to store and process the data. Why would we do such a thing? To provide excellent healthcare to people. Even ungrateful French people. Our product was lower cost and higher quality than our competitors, with better patient outcomes. What monsters we were for running our servers in the U.S., right?
  - gnud 5y ago
    This sort of regulation is not new when it comes to health data. I'm actually surprised storing medical data outside the country was legal in France at any point, I don't think it would have been in my country. So blaming the GDPR and new rules, seems a bit weird in this case. Now, consumer protection regulation is always a balancing act. And most consumer protection laws will hurt some companies that didn't actually do anything bad. That doesn't mean I don't want any regulations. Particularly when it comes to healthcare.
    - VikingCoder 5y ago
      Sorry, I'm talking in general, not specifically about GDPR and new rules. The whole trend stifles innovation because it's literally a barrier to entry. And my real concern was people who want that cake, and also want to pretend they're not "fragmenting" the Internet. I wish people would call it what it is.

titzer 5y ago

It 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 ago
I 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 ago
  Those 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.
  - VikingCoder 5y ago
    Seems like it doesn't bother you at all if this hurts competition. Or maybe you don't understand that by hurting competition, consumers are hurt? In our case, with a medical product, it was patients who were hurt.
    - 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
      It just shifts competition into new areas that are compliant with the law. If you can't use aws-us-east from france, then AWS is incentivized to build a (compliant) center in france or else lose that slice of the pie to the locals (or to a potential compliant azure center there). It's always a tradeoff between racing to the bottom and stagnating. Both are bad, both hurt consumers, and this seems like a good balance between them.
      - VikingCoder 5y ago
        So eventually, we'll all just run a full copy of our stack in each of the 50 United States, plus the few extras for cities that have different laws, and then in each of the other 190 countries around the world? Does that seem like a good balance of needs to you?
        6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
        If that's what it takes to allow locals to govern themselves independently, sure. The technical difficulties seem so entirely solvable, in time (and with that competition you mentioned). Right now it's easy to deploy servers across tons of instances. In the future, if we need to, we can build analogous solutions to the problems you're talking about. And where we can't build our way to easy solutions, that's fine. Those cases are probably the ones where there are legitimate local differences in what's acceptable, and I want locals to be able to decide that for themselves. It's an absurd goal to try to make it easy for six engineers alone to scale to the entire planet.
        VikingCoder 5y ago
        > It's an absurd goal to try to make it easy for six engineers alone to scale to the entire planet. That's an interesting assertion. As counter-example to that assertion, [gestures at huge amounts of the internet as we know it, which was started by small teams.] And I'm not talking about scaling to 7 billion users. I'm talking about scaling to all of _my_ users, even though they live in dozens or hundreds of countries.
- zekrioca 5y ago
  And I think your team did not think through before implementing your product. The GDPR and its consequences have been discussed for a very long time. And the product even managed to get locked into Azure.
  - VikingCoder 5y ago
    > a very long time What's a very long time to you might not be a very long time to me. GDPR wasn't a draft when the product I'm talking about first launched. The Azure offering did not exist when my small team needed it.
- salawat 5y ago
  You're absolutely right. Unfortunately, the little guy is more easily accommodated for with lenoency during onboarding regulation-wise, and the bigger actors can never be brought to heel if something doesn't go down on paper.

zelphirkalt 5y ago

You are building up a whole strawman here. This is all about sending personal data to a machine in the US, owned by a company, which falls under US law. You don't have to send that personal data to the US, do you? Why would you do such a thing in the first place? Surely informed people would not simply consent to such a practice. And I mean informed. Not just clicking "OK OK next OK" without knowing what actually goes on, just to be able to see the actual content of a website.

VikingCoder 5y ago
It's not a strawman, it was the company I worked for. We helped manufacture medical devices. We sold a device that took medical images, and then sent the images to a server. The server would do tons of processing on the images, and help manufacture a medical device custom to the patient. We ran our servers in the United States. We could not sell our product in France, until we stood up servers in France to store and process the data. Why would we do such a thing? To provide excellent healthcare to people. Even ungrateful French people. Our product was lower cost and higher quality than our competitors, with better patient outcomes. What monsters we were for running our servers in the U.S., right?
- gnud 5y ago
  This sort of regulation is not new when it comes to health data. I'm actually surprised storing medical data outside the country was legal in France at any point, I don't think it would have been in my country. So blaming the GDPR and new rules, seems a bit weird in this case. Now, consumer protection regulation is always a balancing act. And most consumer protection laws will hurt some companies that didn't actually do anything bad. That doesn't mean I don't want any regulations. Particularly when it comes to healthcare.
  - VikingCoder 5y ago
    Sorry, I'm talking in general, not specifically about GDPR and new rules. The whole trend stifles innovation because it's literally a barrier to entry. And my real concern was people who want that cake, and also want to pretend they're not "fragmenting" the Internet. I wish people would call it what it is.