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Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

I dunno, if France (or any country) was interested in tactics for curtailing NSA spying on French citizens, there are other, more effective options.

For example, they could make it illegal for a company to make available the private communications of French residents to any third party, explicitly sovereign intelligence agencies.

I think this would put Facebook, Google and such into a catch 22 and pressure for an agreement would come from companies like these. Imagine Facebook being prosecuted in France for complying with an NSA directive. It would be especially effective if done as part of a big case/effort where sovereign intelligence agencies included rivalrous countries (Russia, US, China) that don't like to be compared to one another.

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> For example, they could make it illegal for a company to make available the private communications of French residents to any third party, explicitly sovereign intelligence agencies.

You mean like Ireland? That's working really well so far.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/31/judge-rules-that-mi...

Sure, why not. France already seems dead set on making sure Google can't do business there.

I think it is fair that any company lives by the rules of a country it wishes to make business in. I don't like the idea that companies whether they be foreign or not set the rules of the game. This is up to politics whether companies like this or not. Therefore, as a European I would welcome any ruling which forbids transfer of personal data outside the realm of the jurisdiction I am living under. This might be uncomfortable for Google or Facebook but I think especially the handling of personal data is more important as whether it is convenient for them to do business here.

The problem is that the internet has muddied what it means to do business in a country. If a Frenchman does a Google search, is that really Google doing business in France? Or even more ridiculously, what if I, who am not French, search for information about a French business or citizen? France seems to think it should have some power in these situations. That's not a reasonable demand.

I sincerely hope Google refuses to bend just to see if France has the balls to try and enforce their dumb laws. Maybe they will set up their own national search engine "froogle" that will refuse to perform searches for 12 hours every week because it's on strike.

I think he means that the French are insisting that Google not only censor the search results for Frenchmen, but also for Americans. That is never going to fly.

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