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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

It seems the time has arrived for each country where international services have a market presence to have regulators who regulate how they operate in country.

It makes little sense that US or Chinese laws or customs should be applied world-wide.

Countries should exercise their own rights and not cede them to corporations who are voracious for profit and occasionally dabble in cultural imperialism and quite frequently detract vast amounts of personal data from citizens to the benefit of the companies.

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South Korea has been regulating its Internet with an iron fist for a long time, with dubious results. For many years, IE was de facto the only browser because the only authorized sign-in method for govt services relied on an ActiveX plugin, and to this date the functionality of eg Google Maps in Korea is crippled because laws regulating maps force all map data and associated services to be in Korea.

Perhaps if more counties required corps to house their citizens’ data locally, they would be better served.

The EU is requiring this, though it EU wide, Russia, and China when it allows them to operate at all.

Coca-cola needs to follow local laws, so why should Facebook or Google etc. be exempt?

Because information isn't a rival or exclusive product like soft drinks or precious metals. What you're advocating for is a Splinter-net/Great Firewall.

Shouldn't each country in the world be forced through network effects to export 30% of its purely local taxi revenue to the US (Uber's end game)?

This is technically how it has always been, but tech companies try to employ tricks to avoid it, like claiming it's too hard to comply with individual national or state laws. Another exciting prospect for harmful companies is to enshrine the laws they want in place as a treaty that countries can't easily legislate around: That's what the Trans-Pacific Partnership was about. When you see a massive trade treaty, you'll find an insane amount of shadow lobbying investment in everyone getting their preferred laws enforced on other countries, which also often includes prohibitions on countries passing laws that do certain things.

This last one is pernicious. I’m so glad it was scuttled. Even Bernie was for scuttling it but most everyone else curiously was clamoring for it, especially Clinton and Obama “gold standards” as they called it.

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