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Comment by CodeSheikh | Hacker News Reader

Does your website serve users from EU region or do you intend to block incoming traffic form EU? If you serve them then you might want to collect some data points about them. It is like being on the internet you are by default given a chance to operate business (website in this case) in whatever country a user access your website from. You are not going to open a franchise in Germany and not abide by their local laws concerning about German shoppers right?

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This is an insane argument. So now by having a blog, I’m under the jurisdiction of 200 countries and countless other small jurisdictions? What happens when they all contradict each other? Or when I can’t tell what jurisdiction a user belongs to? Or when they pass crazy laws like anti-blasphemy or demand half my revenue, or whatever?

I don’t think you’ve thought this through.

> So now by having a blog, I’m under the jurisdiction of 200 countries and countless other small jurisdictions?

Guess what? You already are. For example, if you insult the Thai king on your blog and you visit Thailand you can be prosecuted. This has happened.

Of course, you can't be extradited for this. But if you are a notorious online controversialist you should be careful where you travel.

There’s a difference between actually being under the jurisdiction of a government and them claiming that you are. My contention here is with so many people claiming that I should care as a matter of morality or something. That the EU’s claim here is right and just. Under that logic, so is Thailand’s. Is that really the world we want?

Obviously if the EU has some enforcement mechanism, I should be cautious, even if they’re in the wrong (like Thailand). But they don’t have any actual enforcement mechanism, so this just seems irrelevant to me.

So, you're saying if someone from Saudi Arabia sees a German website that shows a woman's bare knees, that the German site will have to pay Saudi fines?

The fans of this law seem incapable of separating its intent from the practical realities of the underlying principle it introduces. Namely, that every website on the internet is now subject to any laws by any jurisdiction in the world (down to the city level) because some subject of that jurisdiction might visit their site. It’s insane.

Fast Forward 10 years: "and that's how decentralized internet was born"

Did you just compare a data privacy law with some hypothetical obscure privacy law? Amusing. Per your analogy, if German website still wants to be shown in SA then either they get SA govt on board with w/e content they are serving (bare knees in this case) or they stop traffic coming in from SA altogether or they simply comply with SA local laws and censor content (bare knees). You should do some research on how US based website show content in Chinese region.

By any means I am not a fan of GDPR.

That's China doing the blocking... You're saying I should have to perform custom work for a legal case that I'm not under jurisdiction of.

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