It never ceases to amaze me how much 21st century people want to cling to the provisions of a document written well over 200 years ago by terrorists who actually wanted an effective central government with a wide range of enforceable powers.
Posts by Scientist & Saint
5 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jan 2015
ANOTHER US court smacks down EFF's NSA wiretap sueball – but won't say why
The optic NERVE of it: Intel declares WAR on InfiniBand
Pull up the Windows 10 duvet and pretend Win8 and Vista were BAD DREAMS
Is EU right to expand 'right to be forgotten' to Google.com?
Wednesday 28th January 2015 20:44 GMT
Re: Prehaps we need to understand the core problem
@ I ain't Spartacus
<SNIP>
But there's no problem with legislating for Google. Sure it's a huge multi-national. But it makes tens of billions of dollars of sales in Europe per year. And those sales are for advertising to European customers. In the end the EU can control that revenue stream (at least to some extent), and that gives it control over Google.
It's still possible to set up in a different jurisdiction and shout "ya boo sucks to you EU", and publish what you want. So long as it's legal where you are. And so long as you have no financial or physical ties to the jurisidction you're ignoring the laws of, you'll be safe. But Google are about the money, and the EU is a market of half a billion of some of the richest people in the world.
</SNIP>
Fine in theory.
In practice, if Google pull up the drawbridge, and we all have to start using google.com/uk, google.com/de, google.com/fr etc, all hosted in the USA, then we will all soon get used to that.
Wikileaks donation pressure is one thing - passing legislation forbidding businesses in Europe from advertising in/on foreign publications/websites, and forbidding banks from processing payments from a legitimate European entity to a legitimate US one, or to another European one which advertises with a legitimate US one is quite another.
Wednesday 28th January 2015 20:44 GMT
So - let's postulate a not utterly unbelievable scenario. Which is that despite all our past efforts, the Taliban end up in charge of Afghanistan. If you want you can add a less likely, but probably not impossible one, that ISIS form a state which gets recognised for reasons of realpolitik.
To those, let's also consider existing highly censorious regimes, like Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea...
Now let's pose a question to the EU legislators who think it's a good idea to be able to make web sites and Internet service providers in non-EU countries subject to EU laws:
How would you react if Afghanistan, or Isis, or Saudi Arabia, or Iran, or North Korea came to you and said that all European web sites and service providers had to comply with their laws on what was acceptable content?
This isn't _intended_ as a rhetorical question - I realise that in reality it probably is, but if by chance you are such a legislator, or if you could draw the attention of one to this, then I would ask that you give it serious consideration. Think what the world would be like if the whole of the internet had to conform to the laws and standards of the most restrictive and repressive regimes on the planet.
For that is the principle you are espousing when you tell people outside the EU that they have to obey EU laws.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
