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Comment by neotek | Hacker News Reader

This immensely stupid law applies to any business that operates in Australia, which includes Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, Facebook, Github, and every other major tech company on the planet.

If they want to continue doing business in Australia (and they very much do) then they'll be forced to comply, which means everybody in the world is negatively affected by this insanity.

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Cutting loose ~25million potential customers might actually be a financially rational for some companies. It's not like we here in Australia are really a very big market on the global stage...

Won't surprise me at all to find some businesses (like perhaps Whisper Systems) who's "doing business in Australia" doesn't actually earn them a single cent, yet will open them up to enormous reputational damage if they continue operating in Australia after this, might just choose to take thier app/service out of the .au app stores...

(BRB, backing up my iDevices and switching auto-update off...)

Please don't turn off updates. You're going to miss out on exploit fixes, which puts you in a worse position.

If they want to continue doing business in Australia (and they very much do)

Meh. 25 million people, and not a top ten economy. Australia has a powerful reality distortion field that makes it seem more important than it is. Must be the tourist marketing and the fact that it punches above its weight in producing successful entertainers.

It’s more likely that WhatsApp and other encrypted messaging apps will just get pulled from the Australian App Store (if the Australian App Store remains in place, since it’s likely to be chosen as a distribution vector for compromised software).

The population isn't a relevant part of the argument, Mexico has 130 million people and has a smaller economy than Australia. After the top 6 or 7 economies, the next 6 or 7 are all comparable in size.

But more importantly, because of the high GDP per capita and low income inequality, Australians are wealthy with lots of disposable income. And so most international marketplaces see disproportionately high amounts of Australian spending when considering population size.

For instance, where I work, the top 5 spending countries are the US, Canada, Australia, UK, China in that order.

Of they don't get pulled, well, that tells you something too.

Fastmail, don't forget.

With a somewhat heavy heart, but I shall be cancelling my service there.

Does anyone know of a similar service hosted in Canada?

i wonder if this would affect other, non autstralian mail providers (protonmail for instance).

No it does not, as we fall solely under Swiss jurisdiction since we don't have a presence in Australia.

From the Bill itself "A person is a designated communications provider if...

4 the person provides an electronic service that has one or more end-users in Australia

5 the person provides a service that facilitates, or is ancillary or incidental to,the provision of an electronic service that has one or more end-users in Australia

6 the person develops, supplies or updates software used, for use, or likely to be used, in connection with:(a) a listed carriage service; or(b) an electronic service that has one or more end-users in Australia"

I believe ProtonMail falls into these categories. As an Austrlaian and a user of your services myself, will this mean getting service "officially" cut off in Australia?

The Australian government has successfully nuked it's own entire IT industry from orbit. Great job guys.

I feel sorry for the people who started good businesses only to have them destroyed by this shitshow.

If it wasn't so scary as a citizen myself, it'd just be sad.

If that happens, then you could simply use ProtonVPN to bypass the block.

Wouldn't that mean that ProtonVPN then has an end user in Aus, and would then be theoretically subject to all this nonsense?

A user would have to double-VPN for ProtonVPN to be the solution. Right?

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