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Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

The internet was never going to last anyway. Every country wants to impose its own laws on it in order to guarantee the rights of their citizens. Instead of one international network, we'll end up with many national networks with strictly controlled boundaries.

I'm fortunate I got to know the true internet. Truly one of the great wonders of this world.

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The Internet isn't a magical virtual destination immune to the law. It's a communication technology, and like fax, the telephone, and the postal system before it, it runs within the framework of laws of the countries it operates in.

"The" law? There are as many as there are sovereign nations. Are foreigners subjected to your country's laws when they post on your site? No. Your laws cannot be enforced because those people aren't subjected to it. Like an embassy on foreign soil, you have no actual power over those people.

This very site's terms of service infringes my rights by requiring arbitration. Can I do anything about it by legal means? Who knows? Could I even sue them to begin with? Could they even sue me? Do the terms even matter at all?

So essentially each country has control of the physical structure within their borders. This is not different from any other technology.

Now, a country can then hold anything they control as collateral for any other demand they make: France could block a site from the country, they could seize any assets that site has in the country, or arrest personnel in that country. France has a vested interest in not overplaying their hand, such that companies won't operate there at all, but effectively a country has complete power to demand anything in exchange for access to their country.

In that way, the Internet is not subject to any country's law in only that country, but every country's law in every country, insofar as those countries are places they want to do business.

Nothing here is new and the US is traditionally the largest user of this sort of power.

> France could block a site from the country

That's exactly what will turn the international network into regional ones with tightly controlled borders. Large groups of people simply won't be reachable from the outside. My country blocked WhatsApp for several days when it couldn't decrypt messages for the benefit of an investigation.

> they could seize any assets that site has in the country, or arrest personnel in that country

And then countries will start requiring that all data concerning their citizens be stored on computers located on their soil and therefore under their jurisduction. That almost made it into law here. How many sites are just gonna block the entire country in response to that? How many are going to be blocked for not complying?

>Every country wants to impose its own laws on it in order to guarantee the rights of their citizens.

I think that is a very charitable interpretation of what they're imposing, though it may not have been your intent. Rather than "guarantee rights", I think it is just an attempt to assert their powers as governments. Hence the push to collect taxes on internet services, break encryption, and so forth.

But yes, we're heading toward an increasingly-balkanized Internet.

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