For example,
* A US company can be prosecuted on corruption charges if it bribes an official out of its borders. This is even if what they do is not considered bribery in the country itself; you are bound to the US law even when you are doing business outside of it. The US has used this approach to clamp down corruption cases of companies in developing countries.
* Trade embargos work this way. We have an embargo on Iran and ban US based companies from doing business with them, even if its through a subsidiary that operates outside our borders
* US citizens are required to pay taxes when they live in another country (we are the only country to tax globally)
* As a US traveler, you have to follow some US laws even when you are in other countries. The US has used this to combat sex tourism. So while it may be easy to go around the country's age of consent laws while you are visting, you can still be prosecuted in the US. This is to prevent child sex trafficking etc.
Nomentatus has listed other examples in this thread.
Enforcement, on the other hand is pretty difficult. I don't see how Canada force Google to do things outside of it's borders - the worst they can do is kick Youtube out their country.
* The ban affects US companies
* The taxes affect US citizens
* The laws affect US citizens
This has nothing to do with this decision.
What Canada is aiming to do is to force a non-Canadian company to follow Canadian law even if it does not operate at all in Canada.
If it's literally doing no operations inside of Canada then they have nothing to worry about because Canada couldn't do anything to them.
Its pretty hypocritical of companies to rely on local laws to protect them but then act like all their customers on the internet don't exist in any real space and aren't under a nation states juridisction.
I'd prefer a completely free internet, but you don't get to have it both ways
Now what you are staying is something completely different from the OPs argument - you are stating "Google is not a Canadian entity so neither Op's or my arguments matter". I am not a legal expert so I have no idea but the statement that Google "does not operate at all in Canada" seems misleading as I know that Google has offices based in Canada. They have Canadian citizens working in Canadian offices under a registered entity so I am not sure why you are saying that Google "does not operate at all in Canada".
Or does this your idea only work for US cultural norms? Should we then start processes of getting Google out of EU, Asia? After all, a media service who distributes illegal content inside your borders, spreads US propaganda, bans your propaganda ... is dangerous right?
How do we reconcile the fact that those are global services?
Always these false equivalences, every time. I can count on it. In this case, I'm sure GP thinks as I do, that no US court should be able to tell a company what to take down elsewhere in the world. That Google chooses to is another matter. Please please, can we stop trying to deflect the real issue with these whataboutisms?
As a reference: "The Digital Disruption - Connectivity and the Diffusion of Power" by Eric Schmidt & Jared Cohen [http://archive.is/R13l2]
In the past people interpreted the article as "US companies control a large proportion of the internet infrastructure, the government can use this as a foreign policy tool". If you're a foreigner this may not sound cool..
It is natural for a company that maintains complex and entrenched relationships with a government, to influence and being influenced, at home and abroad.
To your broader point about US internet hegemony and government influence, I think it doesn't sound cool to many regardless of where they reside. If we must draw equivalence for history's sake here, one could look at the dissemination of culture over and over again and protectionist measures by the encroached upon in order to retain power, often against the will of the citizens. Over time, people will do what they want, in the meantime all most want is those with power to limit themselves. It also has value to recognize the environments that foster these cultural innovations and fight fire with fire instead of power.
When companies and governments take away the freedom of self-determination from people, then the question becomes more complex.
This is why, despite agreeing with the moral stance, I believe that Google has been put in a difficult position, and do not need a priori defence.
Freedom of information is an important issue, but I prefer to turn my attention to less controversial actors.
Google can sell/offer it's services anywhere as long as it's legal.
I don't see how that could be abused...
There's a lot of combinations in there, and I don't think conversation can be profitable had without being clear. It's fine to fill it in with variables, too, I'm not asking for a concrete binding, but at the very least your question as I read it now is missing whose information is being sold.
(Also note the ONLY thing I'm saying here is that you need to be more clear. I am not making any claims of my own at this time, because before I can have an opinion about an answer to a question, there needs to be a question.)
It seems odd that you're worried about China, when you live in a nation that has been proven to wiretap you by the government, and where private transactions are authorized based on information which three credit score companies store completely insecurely.
We crossed this bridge quite a while ago, it's only the direction that's changing. If I hacked a server in the US from the UK guess where I'm being charged? If I send drugs from Canada to the US guess where I'm being charged? These aren't hypotheticals, they've happened before.
I agree it needs to be changed, but this was foreseeable a long time ago and nobody cared.
The actually do, that's inherent in the nature of sovereignty. You can eliminate the practical effect of that by adopting a single shared global sovereign regime, but that idea is controversial even in the abstract, and in concrete detail even moreso, as those who agree that such a thing is desirable disagree violently on the character that such a regime should have, and mostly view not having one as better than having the wrong one, so we are stuck in a system of multiple sovereigns.
For example, Germany ordered Project Gutenberg to remove certain books from its servers or to make them unavailable to Germans. I maintain a full mirror of Project Gutenberg and I make the banned books available to Germans. If Germany sent me a personal letter demanding I cease and desist, I'd ignore it. If the United States demanded I cease and desist on Germany's behalf, I wouldn't ignore it. But the latter doesn't seem like "Germany's sovereignty" to me.
Yes, both.
> If the United States doesn't enforce the demands of another country with respect to a company in its borders, the company can freely ignore those demands.
The authority to legislate and the ability to impose consequences are two different things. It is, for instance, indisputable that the US has authority to criinalize tax fraud by it's citizens occuring within the US, but if a tax fraudster escapes to a foreign country with all their possessions before the US catches them, and that country is uninterested in assisting the US, the US may well find it practically impossible to enforce sanctions without engaging in interstate conflict.
The only difference with the situation at hand is that an act committee overseas by a foreign entity is more likely to be difficult to sanction since flight for the purpose of evasion is less likely to be necessary (OTOH, if the offender has any contact with the offended jurisdiction, they are still at risk, and being g ofrced to avoid the jurisdiction to avoid sanctions may itself be a kind of sanction.)
It's crazy to see American's pretend the US isn't a massive offender when it comes to pushing their laws well outside their borders.
>>>If Germany sent me a personal letter demanding I cease and desist, I'd ignore it.
You (presumably) don't do any business in Germany, or really care about their government being unhappy with you, which is pretty reasonable. Google wants to keep doing business in Canada, so they have to play ball. Can Canada send people into the US offices of google to enforce any of this? Of course not. But can they shut down google in Canada if it refuses to abide by court orders? You bet. (I doubt it'll come to that though)
I suppose they could stand up a Baidu-like Canadian Google replacement, but it would take a while.