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Comment by kodablah | Hacker News Reader

The defensiveness, at least for me, is that the laws are being applied globally. Nobody should agree with US laws applying in France. Seems a lot of people agree with EU laws applying in the US. The internet is global, laws are not. I have the same opinion if a French company, doing business in the US, is told how it must do things in France by US regulators (as opposed to its part in the US).

> So if you're going to start arguing that the US's 1st amendment should apply in France

Did you read the article? It's the opposite (EU law applying outside of the EU)

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Bear in mind, the way Google applied the law 'only in France' originally was to delist the search result in google.fr, but French citizens could simply go to google.com and the results would be there. So Google was not complying with French law, even in France.

Apparently, they've since taken the step of adding country detection, regardless of which domain you go to, to ensure RTBF is applied based on where you're browsing from.

However, the extended point, is that France has granted those individuals certain rights. It's in France's citizens' best interests for France to protect their citizens' rights globally.

Note that if an American is incarcerated for a violation of another country's laws, the US will often actually intervene and try to negotiate for their release. Your country is protecting your rights (as your country defines them) even when you're outside of their borders.

I believe you'll find that the U.S. intervenes in international incarceration in only the most extraordinary of situations.

Nah, congresspeople do this all the time for people affected who are in their constituency. It's just not federally done.

I see things like this periodically: http://www.smdailyjournal.com/articles/lnews/2016-03-19/esca... and I wouldn't call that extraordinary.

What about cases such as http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/korean-american-in-north...

That's the sort of example where the US may intervene (and the State department's quote here suggests protecting US citizens abroad is a key goal here). According to the law of that country, these people have committed crimes, but the US interprets that law to be 'wrong', and may negotiate for their release.

Actually as of a few weeks ago, they IP blocked French users from Google.com.

The law doesn’t apply globally: it allows a French citizen to ask Google to have their info removed. Period. It doesn’t allow US people to do the same. That this info is hidden in all countries Google operates in is a side-effect. As I wrote in another comment when Gawker is sued for publishing some private info about an American you’re not expecting Gawker to censor itself in the US only.

> The law doesn’t apply globally: it allows a French citizen to ask Google to have their info removed. Period. It doesn’t allow US people to do the same. That this info is hidden in all countries Google operates in is a side-effect.

Currently the info is only hidden if Google thinks that you are searching from within Europe.

Gawker could chose to relocate it's business outside the US, but as long as they are a US corporation, they are bound by US laws and rulings handed down by US courts. Furthermore, defamation laws for publishing content are very different than the right to be forgotten laws which apply to indexing content. No one is arguing that the content is defamation, since it is true and reasonable, the argument is that the content is no longer relevant to a person's character (eg shoplifting arrest as a teenager that made local news).

Fair point; the Gawker analogy doesn’t work here.

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