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Comment by BelleOfTheBall | Hacker News Reader

Ah, seeking to mess with Section 230 again, just like with the EARN It Act. Any company that stays headquartered in the USA if this passes is just begging for trouble.

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so funny considering the history of 230 and how prodigy was the inspiration for it because they modded user posts

That really doesn't change anything. If you want to do business in the US (and everyone does) then you're subject to US laws. "Jurisdiction" here is simply a question of how a country defines it and is willing and able to prosecute it.

For example, if two US citizens on US soil discuss insider trading of an Australian company that does not even do business in the US using trades on US brokers, those two individuals are in violation of the Australian Corporations Act and can be criminally prosecuted (by Australian authorities). Why? Because Australia claims jurisdiction over any Australian company.

Likewise, "sex tourism" with children in South East Asia is rampant and many countries are unwilling or unable to prosecute. Australia has deemed having sex with an underage person in a foreign country is likewise a crime in Australia that they can and do prosecute.

The US is able to to exercise a lot of power with international banks because they have the power to remove a financial institution's access to the US banking system. It's this stick that allowed the IRS to go after Swiss banks for complicity in US citizens evading US taxes.

That's what makes laws like this so silly. Look at how companies split into pieces to avoid corporate tax. They'll simply do the same here. Such a waste of time and effort and it really only affects the small companies which don't have this problem anyway. So dumb.

Yeah all those dumb secretaries, presidents, senators and the people who work for them, they really ought to be reading more HN to learn about how things work.

Unless of course any company whose viability materially depends on Section 230 protections would have been dead in the water pretty much in any other jurisdiction on earth in the first place, the threat of moving out of the US was a naked bluff and the powers that be realized it.

Yep.

If companies are willing to put up with the Chinese government telling them what to do, what to say, and how to operate their business in China, I'm pretty sure America will be fine.

They have a lengthy history of technically illiterate demagoguery and utterly idiotic statements about it while only paying attention to what their lobbyists feed them.

What does this have to do with technical literacy ? They're not writing an RFC and there's nothing technical about section 230 of the communication decency act.

The GDPR was objectively far more consequential and I don’t recall a mass exodus of companies from the EU.

There weren't that many companies to exodus to begin with. But I'm not even in the EU and I do still encounter GDPR "access denied" type pages from time to time from US sites.

Pray tell where should such a company go ?

Ireland looks good, at least on paper. I'm attached to the U.S., but if I was looking at relocating to Ireland I'd want to talk to people I knew who are on the ground there, or at least friends of friends who are. A puff piece, but has some interesting tidbits: https://www.forbes.com/sites/shourjyasanyal/2018/11/27/is-ir...

And I suppose you have done research on the Irish legal system, its liability protections for 3rd party content providers, its jurisprudence on hate speech, defamation and libel ? (hint: it's part of the EU)

I have not, and never claimed I did. I said it looks good on paper. A number of sources have said it is startup friendly.

If the EU's laws are so burdensome, why is there a thriving startup ecosystem in the EU? I have read about EU's stances on hate speech, defamation, and libel (though I wouldn't call that hobby reading research), and I am fine with their stances.

I think we could use more hate speech protection, when I see reports that as much as 60% of the tweets in the current U.S. political conversations are done by biased bots.

And no, I am firmly against EARN IT and the other 230 attacks. We need internet legislation that is thoughtful, created by technical SME staffers and constitutional law SME staffers, not broad-brush legislation pandering to votes, FUD, or special interests.

> If the EU's laws are so burdensome, why is there a thriving startup ecosystem in the EU? I have read about EU's stances on hate speech, defamation, and libel (though I wouldn't call that hobby reading research), and I am fine with their stances.

There is nothing particularly thriving about it. There are just a lot of them because it costs almost nothing to incorporate a company and 'startup' sounds cooler than a 'small consulting business' or a 'software house'.

Can you name many EU startups that IPOd or got acquired for an impressive amount during the last decade or were even considered "unicorns" at any point by anyone other than themselves ?

In any case, Section 230 isn't about startups per se but specifically about 3rd party content providers - know any such companies that are EU-based ?

> I think we could use more hate speech protection, when I see reports that as much as 60% of the tweets in the current U.S. political conversations are done by biased bots.

Have you considered the possibility of those reports being disseminated by biased bots ?

> And no, I am firmly against EARN IT and the other 230 attacks. We need internet legislation that is thoughtful, created by technical SME staffers and constitutional law SME staffers, not broad-brush legislation pandering to votes, FUD, or special interests.

You sound confused. How do you expect those hate speech protections to materialize if not by modifying or cancelling Section 230 ? I mean there's always the option of cancelling the 1st amendment - no one seems to like that pesky thing anyway today.

> Can you name many EU startups that IPOd or got acquired for an impressive amount during the last decade or were even considered "unicorns" at any point by anyone other than themselves?

You mean besides companies like Spotify, Rovio (Angry Birds) or Mojang (Minecraft)?

That's really not that much to show for an economic superpower of almost half a billion people and none of these companies rely on the protections offered by Section 230. I mean maybe if you got creative enough in minecraft you could trigger some but it's owned by Microsoft now so you'll have to deal with their censorship first.

We have different ideas of success. My idea of a successful startup is not that it must reach unicorn status, but that it either has a successful exit where the founders and early employees comfortable enough that they can spend time on their next startup adventure; or that the company survives and continues to grow.

You place a lot of value in unicorns, but there are downsides to shooting to be a unicorn too. If you make it there you may be fabulously wealthy, but you'll have so much investment that most lose control of what they created and many succumb to bad investments that have so much dilution the cap table becomes upside down. Also most who aim for unicorn status ("I want to be rich!") fail. I'm ignoring bubbles, because if you have something that has no real contribution but rides/sparks a fad, then you can still get a lot of investment during a bubble - don't know if you could get to unicorn status though.

As for those companies not being capable of being platforms for hate speech: Minecraft obviously, Spotify is music so that should be a clear possibility, Telegram is messaging so that is also a possible. The ones that are financial apps are unlikely hate speech platforms, unless they allow comments or reviews.

> Can you name many EU startups that IPOd or got acquired for an impressive amount during the last decade or were even considered "unicorns" at any point by anyone other than themselves ?

In Addition to what sobani said:

HelloFresh, Transferwise, N26, Revolut, Telegram (if you stretch the meaning of Europe), Klarna, Auto1 Group to name a few

Of course not all of them operate globally but that isn't a requirement

Switzerland seems to be a popular choice, curious if there any big negatives there (business-wise)

Well for one it's a super expensive country and the cost of doing business is huge, but we aren't talking about general business-friendliness rather about a very specific set of legal protections provided by Section 230 enabling the business models of facebook, twitter, google, reddit et al.

I don't know the specifics of Swiss legal system in that regard but the fact that nothing similar ever came out of there probably says something.

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