zlacker

>>ANewbu+(OP)
> The ICO also confirmed that companies could not avoid accountability by withdrawing their services in the UK.

This is quite a slippery slope. If I host a website in one country, I do not necessarily care where people access my website from. It is not like I actively provide a service to them - they just use internet (decentralised network) to access it. What if I publish a newspaper here, someone takes it where the contents are illegal, am I accountable?

>>elAhmo+ld
I think it's a conflict that was baked into the Internet at its conception. A non-geographic service overlaid on top of a world with a huge amount of geography and borders.

>>afandi+qe
Yeah. We had a chance to invent our own governance on the internet. But we abdicated, and made the internet a free for all. As a result, national governments have stepped in to provide the governance we didn’t program in. And they do it - of course - in an inconsistent, ad hoc way.

There was a period a couple hundred years ago when it was all the rage internationally to write constitutions. Lots of countries got constitutions within a few decades, and almost no constitutions have been written since then. I wonder sometimes how the internet would be different if it were implemented in an era or culture in which people believed in that sort of thing.

>>joseph+TA1
I don't think it would make much difference; an internet constitution would be worth about as much as the paper it's not written on.

>>zerocr+oG1
Paper is so wasteful, prone to the vagaries of time, and also to forgery.

It could be written into blockchain to avoid this, as I hear that is quite popular nowadays.