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Comment by choeger | Hacker News Reader

That's quite the problem we are in, as a global society. Obviously no one wants to give North Korea any say about what can and what cannot be published in the web. But between sovereign, free, democratic societies, different standards might exist. And if you want to do business with, say, the EU as, say, a US tech company you cannot expect US law and commons to apply everywhere. Then it becomes a race to the bottom indeed.

I don't know a solution to this problem. But I also do not want to live in a world, where free speech is effectively limited by Austrian defamation laws and US prudery for everyone.

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> Obviously no one wants to give North Korea any say about what can and what cannot be published in the web. But between sovereign, free, democratic societies, different standards might exist.

The problem is that whether a country can enforce its speech restrictions against outsiders has very little to do with how much we agree with them. If you don't want to follow the law of North Korea, you'll lose access to the North Korean market. Which nobody cares about, so nobody follows them. But what happens when it's China?

The solution is for laws to apply to the location of the host and provide no assistance to anyone who wants to do otherwise. Then you can host your criticisms of politicians in the US and your violations of US prudery in Germany. That isn't a race to the bottom, it's a race to the top. It's the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it, as intended.

> But what happens when it's China?

What happens is US companies quickly capitulate and start appeasing the chinese authorities! They still get access to the american market if they sacrifice core western and american values like freedom of speech and privacy but they lose the growing chinese market if they refuse to do so. It's an easy decision for them.

Lol. Companies are already “capitulating” for the US market. Nike will run ads for Colin Kaepernick but then use questionable ethics in their production line. Of course we as consumers eat all that up.

Why do you care if Nike wants to put on a fake face for their brand in China? They are already doing the same thing here and probably several other places.

> Nike will run ads for Colin Kaepernick

I think you have that backwards.

Want to know why the Chinese market is growing? This very reason. A capitalist economy doing business at all with a communist regime economy of China’s flavor and caliber is a good recipe to have your wealthy business owners and politicians sell you out

Amusingly America is really, REALLY good in applying its rules to the rest of the world.

I'm honestly a bit jealous of that. The EU should grow some balls and make life hell for anyone who violates EU rulings.

> Then it becomes a race to the bottom indeed.

The article used that wording, "a classic risk of a race to the bottom", but it doesn't feel entirely accurate to me.

A classic example of a race to the bottom is when jurisdictions compete to attract businesses by lowering their corporation tax rates and regulations. The end result would be zero taxes and zero regulations (unless a country offered a negative tax rate or other incentives).

For censorship, though, I don't see there being a "race" between countries. Just because Austria bans defamation doesn't mean that all other countries will try to out-compete Austria by banning something even less objectionable. What would "the bottom" even be in this "race"? Banning all speech from the internet? Internet companies would simply avoid having any assets or presence in any country that tried that.

Perhaps a better analogy would be "opening the flood gates" or "a chain is only as strong as its weakest link", suggesting that the strictest set of rules would be the one that ended up being implemented.

Is a tax or regulation incentive race to the bottom really a bad thing? The residents of those jurisdictions that end up without much tax income and the externalities of the lax regulations so they would suffer and pressure their government to increase the tax and make the regulations stricter. Eventually, it should reach an equilibrium where those things are "fair" as determined by all the participants in the market. Jurisdictions would also have the ability to tax or ban imports from places they don't like. Maybe this is too much of a libertarian view? It seems to be the default state of the world though. What are the alternatives besides something oppressive like using military power to prevent other countries from taxing their citizens too little?

Did Washington residents really prefer not to have Boeing at all rather than the tax-incentivized Boing they got? Wasn't it up to them in how they voted? Sometimes they do reject it, like how New York rejected Amazon.

> What are the alternatives besides something oppressive like using military power to prevent other countries from taxing their citizens too little?

Dropping the dogma of free trade and free flow of capital, and taxing any transactions involving tax havens to the point where it's not profitable to use them for tax avoidance.

You can only have countries' tax systems and regulations competing in global "free market" of jurisdictions if the countries are actually free to set arbitrary tax rates and tariffs.

I agree. If the US doesn't like tax havens, then the US can tax the local operations of companies that are incorporated there. No need for any hand wringing. Or maybe the US does like tax havens because they kind of keep the actual operations and money in the US which helps the economy despite a lack of tax.

I would argue that the internet as we know it today would not exist without the American 1st amendment. If that ever goes away, the internet as we know it today will no longer exist. The majority of the worlds hosting companies are here and there is a reason why people throughout the world use a vpn just to have simple online conversations that we freely enjoy.

I would argue that is wrong. We have free speech over in europe too and not because the US forced it on us, but it also is something we generally value. We just dont run around claiming its the most amazing thing ever.

Well, i think what will happen , is the implementation of adapter classes, eh companies, that represent and adapt a concept locally - and are for the local law responsible, while formally independent from the multi-national mother ship.

Your statement about North Korea strikes me as a very discriminatory, as it implies your judgement about NK is somehow objective, and it's political system is a condition justifying them being denied equal treatment in various situations.

No, their judgement about NK is subjective but widely shared.

It is perfectly reasonable to discriminate against political systems that you disagree with. It's pretty much the basis of international diplomacy, such as it is: a system of bargaining and coercion that usually prevents outright war.

The basis of international diplomacy isn't discrimination against systems you disagree with, it's about getting most power and resources possible.

Caring about political systems is just spin used as an excuse.

Indeed, the US at the same time went hard after Japan whose political system (even though in practice is barely it at all democratic) it created, but courted the Chinese one-party state.

The rest is just rhetoric.

Omg are you serious? Do you have any good things to say about NK political or judicial system? Would you defend Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia the same way?

The correct person to ask would be a patriotic citizen of one of those countries. People are usually biased towards their own system and have trouble even conceptualizing the motivations behind radically different ones, especially when they don't even try because they've already internalized the belief that they're automatically bad. But the people who supported those systems had their own experiences motivations and in many cases it did work out well for them compared to the alternatives or what came before.

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