This is going to be a big problem for multinational corporations like Google and Microsoft in the coming years. In order to do business in Country X, they'll ha

This is going to be a big problem for multinational corporations like Google and Microsoft in the coming years. In order to do business in Country X, they'll have to censor all information that is objectionable to the citizens of X, even when citizens of other countries are trying to access it. Google pulled its Chinese version a few years ago, redirecting users to the Hong Kong version instead. But Google only had a small stake in the Chinese market when it did that. It can't pull the same trick with the EU. It needs to sell ads in the EU, and you can't sell ads in a country while openly violating its laws. Why doesn't the EU take issue with the fact that, for example, the Internet Archive probably has copies of every page that EU citizens want censored? Well, to begin with, few people even know about the Internet Archive. But even more importantly, the Internet Archive has no presence whatsoever in the EU. It's a US charity with US servers. So although it will never be able to get away with hosting content that violates American law, it doesn't need to give a flying fuck about EU law, Thai law, Russian law, or whatever. Oh, the Saudis want to censor images of women driving cars? Feel free to arrest our Chairman if he ever visits Saudi Arabia. I think this is exactly why keeping the flow of information distributed is so important to keeping it open. Different countries want to censor different kinds of information, so the union of censored information is huge, but the intersection is very small. If we become dependent on a few multinational corporations to access information, we'll end up suffering the union of every censorship regime in the world (or at least the union of regimes where those corporations do business in). But if we keep the flow of information distributed, only the intersection need be censored.