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Comment by moonchrome | Hacker News Reader

The thing people are missing when they say "naturally foreign government collecting data is a security risk" - is that by US openly admitting this - they are signaling to all other countries allowing US tech companies to operate there that they should be firewalling because it is a security risk.

World is > US and China, Europe, SA, Africa, the rest of Asia - this is a clear cut message "you need to have your social networking in-country to prevent others from compromising you".

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I honestly think that should be done anyway. For example, if Britain blocked Facebook for not being consumer friendly what would we really lose? Facebook would be recreated over night. The profits would be kept in country. And in addition, we might have a slightly better barrier against the American culture seeping into the country.

Sure, we could lose some app integrations but if the internet was more segregated API standards would be developed to mitigate this.

Ofcom are slowly getting their teeth back with upcoming regulation (3 decades late IMO), but in answer to "what would we really lose?", we'd likely suffer immediate tit-for-tat responses from the US if we attempted to meaningfully regulate or partition our media from theirs again.

I don't think anyone who has spent much time thinking about it sees the Russia/China/Iran firewalls as a bad thing, but we aren't them and we can't regulate our media in the same way.

Right of course, completely forgot about the possibility of starting a trade war.

That's ridiculous - for a lot of people I know number one use case for Facebook is keeping in touch with people that move away - very often out of country.

Rebuilding social network would take a long time, having it country specific would be pointlessly limiting.

Chunking up internet between countries would be going down further into isolationism for GB since they aren't even a part of EU anymore.

It's not ridiculous. I'd say if US and UK policy on privacy continues to diverge it may become necessary or even obvious.

It only seems ridiculous because it hasn't happened yet.

Other solutions can be found to keeping in contact with friends that move away without having to give undue power to some international tech behemoth. And while building a new Facebook wouldn't be easy, I wouldn't say it would be necessarily hard either. It'll just take time. Hell, the competition may even be good for Facebook on the end.

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