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Comment by icebraining | Hacker News Reader

Playing Devil's advocate, there are 193 countries in the UN; is it reasonable to ask site owners to keep abreast of the Internet laws passed in each one, and spend a couple of days for each, even if you just serve your compatriots?

I'm biased for the GDPR, since I think every site should follow its principles regardless of legal obligation, but I don't think the rationale you're proposing is scalable.

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Hello mere mortals,

Its your favorite dictator, the leader of Crazystan and from 29th of May 2018 I ask that from that date, for every site accessed by citizens of my country I require the hosting company to send one employee to be sacrificed to our mighty gods.

Failure to comply will attract a fine of 50 Gazillion dollars.

Laws are made with physical borders in mind. Digital world doesn't have those borders. But it seems that politicians are expecting those borders to work.

I'm not even sure about sane way to map IP address to country. There are some geolocation services, but I doubt that they are 100% precise and probably paid. Also if I'm using geolocation service passing IP of the incoming request, does that mean that I'm already violated someone's privacy? This is weird.

With IPv4 stretched thin, there's a lot of international trade, even of small blocks. Also, multihomed servers can announce IPv4 from one ASN on another ASN, given permission. Anyway, it's nontrivial to really know where an IPv4 is located.

The block is to pacify the lawyers, it doesn't really matter if it's effective.

It should be noted that I'm talking about the previous poster's proposal. The GDPR doesn't demand that; it specifically says that simply being available in the EU does not automatically make it fall under the regulation.

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