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My message to America is this: You can’t have it both ways. You as a country value radical freedom of speech domestically. Hate speech, anything, it’s all fair
by raganwald 15y ago
My message to America is this: You can’t have it both ways. You as a country value radical freedom of speech domestically. Hate speech, anything, it’s all fair game. Fine. You as a country also clamp down on “sinful” behaviour like gambling and the soft drugs like Marijuana. Your country, you get to set the rules. But you try to impose your rules on the rest of the world when we do business with your citizens. A Canadian was extradited to the US for the crime of selling marijuana seeds to US citizens, which is legal in Canada but illegal in the US. You have arrested foreign programmers for writing DRM-circumventing software and foreign businessmen for running online gambling businesses that catered to American customers.
Your message to the world is that if we violate your laws, you will subject us to your justice system.
Now we have a US company that does business in other countries, and those countries have laws that differ from yours. Why shouldn’t they comply with those country’s laws when the do business there, just as you expect companies in foreign jurisdictions to comply with American laws when they do business with your citizens?
My feeling is that if you don’t want Twitter censoring Nazi discussions in Germany, hand back the Canadian who sold marijuana seeds by mail to Americans.
- spindritf 15y ago> A Canadian was extradited to the US for the crime of selling marijuana seeds to US citizens A Canadian arrested and extradited by the Canadian authorities, according to agreements signed by the Canadian government elected by the Canadian people. While there is something to be said about American government lobbying around the world for laws and regulation beneficial to its interests, at least as perceived by the bureaucrats, it does not happen without the cooperation of (usually) democratically elected officials in other countries.
- raganwald 15y agoSo very true! He was extradited by the same back-room wheeling and dealing that has caused us to sign on to ACTA. But blame in this case is non-zero-sum. I am against the actions of my government in this matter AND against the actions of the US government. I feel exactly the same way about his situation as I did about Sklyarov, when he travelled to the US and was arrested for something he did in Russia. All I’m saying is that if you take the position that US companies should not be required to comply with the local laws of their users, then you should take the position that foreign companies need not be required to comply with American laws. Either that, or hope that Twitter’s executives never hop on a flight to China and have it touch down in Frankfurt.
- drcube 15y agoWholeheartedly agree. I hate oppressive American laws as much as German, Saudi, Chinese, et cetera. On the other hand, refusing to do business in oppressive locales is not the same as extraditing foreign nationals for breaking laws they had no say in and that technically shouldn't even apply to them. One is bad, the other is... not bad, to say the least.
- andylei 15y agothat's not the argument. no one thinks that when twitter does business in germany it shouldn't be bound by german laws. people think that twitter shouldn't do business in germany.
- nir 15y agoTwitter, in the end, is an American company. If it was Canadian, I'd think it should comply by Canadian law. The other option, of having it comply by each country's own laws (the German example is obviously a rather tame one) is needlessly restrictive. That various cases you refer to seem wrong (I don't really have all the data) but I'm not clear why they make it OK for Twitter to potentially censor dissent in a dictatorship, for example.