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> in case just by being accessible there you incur a liability. This is a dangerous precedent though that IMO everyone should fight against. It's how we get t

> in case just by being accessible there you incur a liability. This is a dangerous precedent though that IMO everyone should fight against. It's how we get the balkanization of the internet, and the death of it as a global network. TBH we also shouldn't put the onus on blocking "unsafe" countries on the website owners, nor an intermediary like CloudFlare. If a nation wants to block certain content, let the nation deal with it by getting their own ISPs to block and make sure the citizen's anger gets correctly placed on their government and not the site operators.

colechristensen 1y ago
It depends on the kind of website. If you're not advertising, selling anything, or otherwise doing any business through your website you're much more emboldened to not care about every jurisdiction. But if you're trying to make money through your website... well sorry you're doing business in those countries and I don't have a ton of objection to you needing to follow foreign laws. I'm fine with "balkanization" (I know some people from the Balkan countries... maybe they'd object to the use of that word) if it means a freedom divide and actual consequences for countries ever eroding freedoms.
- fizzynut 1y ago
  The huge plus of the internet is that you can be disruptive on a global scale on a somewhat even footing to the giants. If you place a giant burden such that before you even do anything of value you need to conform to 100s of different laws/regulations from 100 different countries you create a world where only large companies can exist and everyone else is pushed out.
  - dexterdog 1y ago
    Isn't that the goal of these nonsense laws?
- bigbadfeline 1y ago
  > But if you're trying to make money through your website... well sorry you're doing business in those countries. Say, I'm the provider... well sorry, you (the customer) are doing business with a foreign country (mine) and you should do it in accordance with YOUR laws about YOUR country's foreign trade. That's the only way to properly conform to jurisdiction, amirite? In other words, UK has no jurisdiction over US businesses who conduct business from US soil, UK cannot force them to obey UK law just because a UK citizen decided to buy something over the internet. The UK can punish THEIR citizens for what the UK considers unlawful trades and that's always the case no matter what. Claiming jurisdiction over foreign businesses ends up in a completely lunatic situation where every business, in every country, has to obey the laws of every other country just because some people might decide to order from abroad. Block, ban, punish only where you have jurisdiction, everything else ends up in sheer insanity.
  - bdangubic 1y ago
    I love this idea of businesses doing and selling whatever the F they want and citizens being punished based on laws in their country. not sure why US businesses even have to obey US laws?!? just punish the consumers/citizens and be done with it of course defining what “US” business is might be quite challenging, is Apple a US company?! They make nothing in the US and pay no taxes in the US … love this idea though!
    - bigbadfeline 1y ago
      > not sure why US businesses even have to obey US laws Because there are laws for US businesses over which the US government has jurisdiction. > just punish the consumers/citizens and be done with it. That happens too, when consumers break the laws that apply to them. In the case of international transactions, the law has to account for the pesky jurisdiction: It's nothing new, when travelers/consumers go through the customs, THEY are responsible for the goods they import, NOT the party that sold those goods to them! That's the only sane way to do it and it's an established practice, there's no reason to do it differently when a consumer imports something using the internet! > of course defining what “US” business is might be quite challenging, is Apple a US company?! Yes it is, also, Apple's branches in other countries are companies under the jurisdiction of those other countries. It's not that complicated.
loeg 1y ago
The balkanization is being caused by the UK. No technical solutions prevent this.
- hopelite 1y ago
  It’s rather ironic, because the very kind of “social credit score” that we were told the Chinese are subject to is has existed in the West and is being implanted in a far more sly way with things like tone policing; arbitrary accusation of rule breaking of ever increasingly narrow, convoluted, and subjective rules enforced by faceless mods and surely son by AI bots, bans, and even extraordinary lengths to hunt down anyone that “evades a ban”. I just heard about that TikTok has already implement a censorship regime that excludes topics and concepts for which you get a ding on your social credit score. Not even something that was done when China was racially in control of TikTok.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Welcome to Schufa in Germany, the “social credit score” without which is almost impossible to rent or buy in most German cities, if the report (which most folks hardly know how it gets calculated) doesn't have the right numbers on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schufa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schufa
    - UweSchmidt 1y ago
      That's just a basic financial credit score, and you can easily rent without one (even though some financial accountability is probably reasonable to balance the strong renter protection laws here). What's so nefarious about it?
      - mschuster91 1y ago
        The intransparency and the constant attempts to get access to more and more data troves. And the borderline extortionate pricing - it's not the landlords who have to pay for each score report, it is expected that interested renters pay. Close to as vile as the real estate broker pages where you are chanceless until you pay for a premium membership.
0xfffafaCrash 1y ago
> If a nation wants to block certain content, let the nation deal with it by getting their own ISPs to block and make sure the citizen's anger gets correctly placed on their government and not the site operators. I don’t really understand comments like these. Even if you’re exactly right about how it should work, how would you make this happen in the world we live in? Neither the tech community nor ISPs nor cloud companies decide these things. Just because a matter affects us doesn’t mean we have much of a voice in it especially if it’s legal. Laws about tech are decided by (idiot) politicians/parties/governments and the consequences are enforced by massive fines, imprisonment, etc. by law enforcement and selective (and often politically motivated) prosecution. In some of the worst places the consequences could include death. Afghanistan just lost access to the internet almost entirely. China and North Korea are famous for their firewalls. Much of Asia has internet blackouts whenever there are large scale protests. The western world’s government has more legal jurisdiction/economic influence on the companies that run these things and are increasingly leveraging that for their desired censorship. If the answer to this is democratic influence, the populations of many countries don’t really have that, the majorities in countries that do have it certainly doesn’t know or care about these things and wouldn’t vote for the pro-censorship politicians in the first place if they’d then vote to cut off their nation’s access to uncensored internet while preserving the uncensored variants, and even if the majority ever did care to get the system to work in this way there’s a global trend away from having their opinions on such things matter anyway.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  I’m equally baffled by all of these calls for extensive regulation and enforcement of Internet rules on HN. Someone in the comment section is unironically calling for imprisoning parents who let their kids use the internet. There are suggestions throughout the comment section calling for ID checks on websites. Is nobody thinking about what this actually means? Do you really want the entire internet to require ID validation every time you use it? Do you want your government deciding if your content is okay to view, or okay to post? Do you welcome the level of tracking of privacy violations that inherently come with this much government intervention? It seems people on HN have a sudden wake up call whenever these rules get too close to reality, like when access to websites gets cut off or ID verification is added to websites that they use. My theory is that they’re imagining a world where only the services they dislike get regulated: The TikToks and Facebooks of the internet. None of these people calling for extensive regulation are thinking that sites they use would ever end up on the regulated sites list, but if you enjoy any site with user submitted content (Hacker News included) then you’re calling for additional regulation and tracking of yourself when you demand these things.
reaperducer 1y ago
It's how we get the balkanization of the internet, and the death of it as a global network. That ship sailed at least a decade ago. From small instances like your employer blocking certain web sites (Google Translate, seriously?) to China's Great Firewall to nations restricting access in certain regions (India, many others), to nations restricting access to certain web sites (Turkey, many many others), to entire countries taking themselves entirely offline (Afghanistan, most recently).

colechristensen 1y ago

It depends on the kind of website. If you're not advertising, selling anything, or otherwise doing any business through your website you're much more emboldened to not care about every jurisdiction. But if you're trying to make money through your website... well sorry you're doing business in those countries and I don't have a ton of objection to you needing to follow foreign laws. I'm fine with "balkanization" (I know some people from the Balkan countries... maybe they'd object to the use of that word) if it means a freedom divide and actual consequences for countries ever eroding freedoms.

fizzynut 1y ago
The huge plus of the internet is that you can be disruptive on a global scale on a somewhat even footing to the giants. If you place a giant burden such that before you even do anything of value you need to conform to 100s of different laws/regulations from 100 different countries you create a world where only large companies can exist and everyone else is pushed out.
- dexterdog 1y ago
  Isn't that the goal of these nonsense laws?
bigbadfeline 1y ago
> But if you're trying to make money through your website... well sorry you're doing business in those countries. Say, I'm the provider... well sorry, you (the customer) are doing business with a foreign country (mine) and you should do it in accordance with YOUR laws about YOUR country's foreign trade. That's the only way to properly conform to jurisdiction, amirite? In other words, UK has no jurisdiction over US businesses who conduct business from US soil, UK cannot force them to obey UK law just because a UK citizen decided to buy something over the internet. The UK can punish THEIR citizens for what the UK considers unlawful trades and that's always the case no matter what. Claiming jurisdiction over foreign businesses ends up in a completely lunatic situation where every business, in every country, has to obey the laws of every other country just because some people might decide to order from abroad. Block, ban, punish only where you have jurisdiction, everything else ends up in sheer insanity.
- bdangubic 1y ago
  I love this idea of businesses doing and selling whatever the F they want and citizens being punished based on laws in their country. not sure why US businesses even have to obey US laws?!? just punish the consumers/citizens and be done with it of course defining what “US” business is might be quite challenging, is Apple a US company?! They make nothing in the US and pay no taxes in the US … love this idea though!
  - bigbadfeline 1y ago
    > not sure why US businesses even have to obey US laws Because there are laws for US businesses over which the US government has jurisdiction. > just punish the consumers/citizens and be done with it. That happens too, when consumers break the laws that apply to them. In the case of international transactions, the law has to account for the pesky jurisdiction: It's nothing new, when travelers/consumers go through the customs, THEY are responsible for the goods they import, NOT the party that sold those goods to them! That's the only sane way to do it and it's an established practice, there's no reason to do it differently when a consumer imports something using the internet! > of course defining what “US” business is might be quite challenging, is Apple a US company?! Yes it is, also, Apple's branches in other countries are companies under the jurisdiction of those other countries. It's not that complicated.

loeg 1y ago

The balkanization is being caused by the UK. No technical solutions prevent this.

hopelite 1y ago
It’s rather ironic, because the very kind of “social credit score” that we were told the Chinese are subject to is has existed in the West and is being implanted in a far more sly way with things like tone policing; arbitrary accusation of rule breaking of ever increasingly narrow, convoluted, and subjective rules enforced by faceless mods and surely son by AI bots, bans, and even extraordinary lengths to hunt down anyone that “evades a ban”. I just heard about that TikTok has already implement a censorship regime that excludes topics and concepts for which you get a ding on your social credit score. Not even something that was done when China was racially in control of TikTok.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Welcome to Schufa in Germany, the “social credit score” without which is almost impossible to rent or buy in most German cities, if the report (which most folks hardly know how it gets calculated) doesn't have the right numbers on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schufa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schufa
  - UweSchmidt 1y ago
    That's just a basic financial credit score, and you can easily rent without one (even though some financial accountability is probably reasonable to balance the strong renter protection laws here). What's so nefarious about it?
    - mschuster91 1y ago
      The intransparency and the constant attempts to get access to more and more data troves. And the borderline extortionate pricing - it's not the landlords who have to pay for each score report, it is expected that interested renters pay. Close to as vile as the real estate broker pages where you are chanceless until you pay for a premium membership.

0xfffafaCrash 1y ago

> If a nation wants to block certain content, let the nation deal with it by getting their own ISPs to block and make sure the citizen's anger gets correctly placed on their government and not the site operators. I don’t really understand comments like these. Even if you’re exactly right about how it should work, how would you make this happen in the world we live in? Neither the tech community nor ISPs nor cloud companies decide these things. Just because a matter affects us doesn’t mean we have much of a voice in it especially if it’s legal. Laws about tech are decided by (idiot) politicians/parties/governments and the consequences are enforced by massive fines, imprisonment, etc. by law enforcement and selective (and often politically motivated) prosecution. In some of the worst places the consequences could include death. Afghanistan just lost access to the internet almost entirely. China and North Korea are famous for their firewalls. Much of Asia has internet blackouts whenever there are large scale protests. The western world’s government has more legal jurisdiction/economic influence on the companies that run these things and are increasingly leveraging that for their desired censorship. If the answer to this is democratic influence, the populations of many countries don’t really have that, the majorities in countries that do have it certainly doesn’t know or care about these things and wouldn’t vote for the pro-censorship politicians in the first place if they’d then vote to cut off their nation’s access to uncensored internet while preserving the uncensored variants, and even if the majority ever did care to get the system to work in this way there’s a global trend away from having their opinions on such things matter anyway.

Aurornis 1y ago
I’m equally baffled by all of these calls for extensive regulation and enforcement of Internet rules on HN. Someone in the comment section is unironically calling for imprisoning parents who let their kids use the internet. There are suggestions throughout the comment section calling for ID checks on websites. Is nobody thinking about what this actually means? Do you really want the entire internet to require ID validation every time you use it? Do you want your government deciding if your content is okay to view, or okay to post? Do you welcome the level of tracking of privacy violations that inherently come with this much government intervention? It seems people on HN have a sudden wake up call whenever these rules get too close to reality, like when access to websites gets cut off or ID verification is added to websites that they use. My theory is that they’re imagining a world where only the services they dislike get regulated: The TikToks and Facebooks of the internet. None of these people calling for extensive regulation are thinking that sites they use would ever end up on the regulated sites list, but if you enjoy any site with user submitted content (Hacker News included) then you’re calling for additional regulation and tracking of yourself when you demand these things.

reaperducer 1y ago

It's how we get the balkanization of the internet, and the death of it as a global network. That ship sailed at least a decade ago. From small instances like your employer blocking certain web sites (Google Translate, seriously?) to China's Great Firewall to nations restricting access in certain regions (India, many others), to nations restricting access to certain web sites (Turkey, many many others), to entire countries taking themselves entirely offline (Afghanistan, most recently).