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Comment by suifbwish | Hacker News Reader

How exactly does a country get off making a law about what the businesses in another country are able to do over the internet? I’m sure there are countries that would like to get rid of free speech and prosecute homosexuality or speaking against a state religion perhaps? Why should we ignore them while listening to Australia’s ridiculous demands for linking to sites available via public DNS?

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If you want to do business, collect money, or have offices or employees in a sovereign country, you have to follow their laws. If you don't like it, you can leave. It's that straightforward.

Sorry. Linking to (not even requesting) a public domain does not give any sovereign nation the right to demand funds. No one who is having funds demanded of them is visiting said country or said site, so no leaving is necessary. It’s frivolous money grabs like this that rob credibility from legitimate intellectual property

Or conversely having a public domain does not give the right to any private enterprise to do business in a sovereign country. I guess that's a pretty solid argument and that's what most people argue for.

Google has offices, employees, multiple registered businesses of various types, and a bunch of physical hardware. They very much are subject to Australian law if they want to stay here.

(That said, the law is insane, and neatly demonstrates how badly our politicians are beholden to Murdoch).

Google also do business in Australia, which means they are subject to Australian laws for the services they provide in Australia...

I agree Australia doesn't get to dictate what people do over the internet from remotely.

Neither does the EU.

Neither does China.

If you violate China's laws with your website, they block you. They don't need you to change your website. It's very simple.

If you violate GDPR, the EU is welcome to block you.

If you violate weird Australian laws, Australia is welcome to block you.

No different. Just that (hee hee) we know the EU and Australia won't dare set up national firewalls. But from the perspective of the website owner, they're welcome to set up a firewall if they don't like the website. But the website isn't going anywhere.

> Australia won't dare set up national firewalls

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Australian govt is pretty open to implementing draconian laws. We've already got mandatory ISP metadata retention; we don't have a bill of rights like USA, we're basically a cryptotheocracy with the head of the Anglican Church as our head of state.

I doubt the Aust Gov could competently setup a national firewall. Especially not a Liberal one.

Who exactly would this firewall be protecting? Bitbucket, Jira and other competing Australian tech products would be dumped by anyone Australia firewalls off and there would be a dozen Silicon Valley startups to take their place over night.

Presumably they only need to filter out selective websites from being displayed inside Australia and not prevent Australian products from working outside of Australia.

"we're basically a cryptotheocracy with the head of the Anglican Church as our head of state."

I sense a teensy bit of exaggeration in this remark. Democratically elected politicians drafted this legislation, not the Queen.

> Australia won't dare set up national firewalls

No... They will just setup a block list and make the ISPs block it. Hell they might even add a levy to the NBN to pay for it.

A country rules by the prerogative of power.

No difference to EU dictating GDPR laws.

That is how law tends to work; it dictates what is lawful within the area it controls.

The EU's attempts to force extra-territorial enforcement of the GDPR are hardly uncontroversial. It remains to be seen what will happen if and when it comes up against another big fish that is willing to take that fight.

As probably the most obvious example, looking at the relative development of the tech sector in the US compared to the EU, particularly now the UK has left, I don't think it takes a genius to work out who loses if the EU really tries to cut off US tech for not playing nicely with EU rules (GDPR or otherwise) and the US government retaliates.

It's laughable how preferentially they try to enforce GDPR on the US vs. other countries.

For example, Tencent has a lot of WeChat users in the EU but the EU haven't done a thing about their gross privacy violations that don't align with GDPR. Or Xiaomi Roborock vacuum cleaners, which are sold in Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, but send Wi-Fi SSIDs, passwords, GPS, and floor maps back to their server with no option to disable that behavior and no option to request deletion of user data.

They mostly target Silicon Valley companies and don't seem to particularly care if other countries' companies violate GDPR.

It's just thinly veiled protectionism - not uncommon for "consumer protection" schemes sadly.

Is it really protectionism when it disproportionately affected EU businesses detrimentally? It's more like they'll apply where the rule of law applies and yet they're too scared to take on China in this case.

> it disproportionately affected EU businesses detrimentally

Well that’s a very interesting take. Enforcement is overwhelmingly targeted at foreign companies, and primarily from the US and EU. I guess you can be the judge of whether it’s a just coincidence that those are the countries that the EU has the most contentious trade relationships with. Aside from China of course, which I’d say you have correctly observed would simply not tolerate the EU trying to enforce its laws extraterritorially.

The EU trying to enforce its laws on citizens of other countries who have never entered theirs is like that loud neighbor in the trailer park who talks about himself in the third person and keeps showing up drunk in his underwear to flirt with your wife and to rant that that your guest wifi isn’t fast enough.

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