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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
No, you're not? It's pretty obvious that if you try to, say, sell illegal drugs to my citizens, I as a country will come after you even if it's legal on your side.
The internet blurred the lines because you don't "show up" in the buyer's country but there's nothing new here: both seller and buyer need to respect the law.
Only my very first rental back in January 2005 wasn't required, however I would say either it wasn't as widespread, or I was very lucky getting the flat from a university student leaving the apartment and her father (the landlord) fancying me.
Most of folks on my friends circle have similar experiences.
but why we have laws at all? if the US business can do whatever the F they want in UK why not in US too?
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.
Sites with user generated content already have to have some level of moderation to remove copyrighted or illegal materials (e.g. child porn). So it's not a big difference to say if you want to have user generated content and not be considered an adult site, you need to take down any submitted adult content (or only allow it in adult verified areas or whatever). If HN doesn't allow people to post their amateur smut stories, it could then be unaffected.
Sure, fine - we can agree on the hardcore porn. Maybe we can even agree on exposed female nipples?
What about sex education material? What about any content that includes an LGBT person? Because if you think I'm being hyperbolic, read page five of Project 2025.
It's also easy for almost everyone to avoid worrying about the lines by just... not trying to exist right along them. If your photography discussion site just has a "no nudity" rule (or blanket puts nudity into its own adult-only section), then you don't have to worry about whether your photo is tasteful art or porn. These are normal rules anyway because sometimes people want to look at their hobby sites in public or at work and just see bird photos or whatever and not have passersby think they're a gooner, or see a surprise decapitation, etc. Even 4chan moderates their hobby boards and separates which ones allow adult material.
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).
If party A and B are interacting in jurisdictions A and B, which party has to abide by which jurisdiction's laws?
Is the consumer moving into the producer's jurisdiction or is the producer moving into the consumer's jurisdiction?
Laws tend to apply more to the business than the consumer around the world and it's probably fair that this remains to be true, but really it is a hard problem when to parties separated by a border are just sending messages back and forth and you're trying to figure out who has to follow which laws.
These aren't equivalent though. I can flash my ID to someone to buy cigarettes at my gas station and reasonably believe that no third party is storing my ID. The clerk looks at it (or scans it? I have actually never purchased anything requiring an ID before), and I go about my merry way.
If I go online to consume adult content, I definitely do not want my identity to be associated with my proclivities, and I certainly don't trust any third party to handle my ID with the sensitivity it ought to have.
That may be true, but it doesn't seem to prevent stuff like this from happening.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/hack-age-verification-...