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Comment by xyzzyz | Hacker News Reader

This sword cuts both ways. US can also stop sales of Airbuses, Volkswagens, IKEA furniture etc. under some fishy premise. If EU does that to US companies, why shouldn’t US do it to EU ones? This kind of tit for tat trade war would be a loss to everyone compared to cooperation, but is still preferred to cooperating with a defector.

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How on earth is "the US is able to demand personal data of EU citizens without due process" a fishy premise?

Isn’t this the case with all sovereign countries, though? You can never guarantee that a government won’t demand a company in that country to hand over data, that is what it means to be sovereign.

Generally speaking, we look at the legal system in the country and decide whether it is /legal/ for the state to do such a thing, and whether there are appropriate safeguards to prevent it from doing so. Yes, they could change the law - and at that point it would become illegal for companies in that country to do business in the EU.

Usually most countries are smart enough not to damage themselves economically by preventing their companies from selling to a large, reasonably rich union.

> Yes, they could change the law

They could also just not follow the law

Indeed. A country which fails to follow its own law on privacy would likely be considered a country which does not have appropriate law on privacy.

There is no tit for tat, we european citizens don't want our personal data to be accessible to the US government and their respective secret agencies.

The US government will not back up from their policy and so we do neither but since we otherwise enjoy a great partnership and alliance, we take this issue pretty "dry and emotionless", trust me, there are no hard feelings or ill intentions.

Comparable move could be for US to forbid using EU hosted services to ie. store medical records of US citizens etc., no?

No, because Germany doesn't have that big of an IT space. Aerospace and automotive would be good sectors to hit back with because they are more relatively important to Germany as IT is for the US.

OK but not wanting our personal records to be arbitrarily sized by the US government is very reasonable. Your government made a law that lets it spy on us... that's your problem.

I don't think it's reasonable that I'm paying more than my share of taxes for the defense capabilities that allows Europe free access to a stable world market and roughly rules based international order that underpins the export economy of Germany in particular. If Europe would fix that, I'd feel a lot worse about the spying.

Complete and utter non-sequitur but I'll humour you.

I never understood American magical thinking that blames Europe for US military spending. In the end, if you want to cut military spending, you can.

Regardless, you're the hegemon. I don't accept that you don't benefit from that position.

I don't think it is a non-sequitur. The spying is part of the overall defense structure that enables the German export economy to function.

EDIT: It's like saying "This thing you're giving me that allows my whole economy to function, I don't like the consequences of how you're doing it."

No one’s making the US do that. Just stop the military spending.

Of course that means the US will no longer be a global superpower, but the US can freely choose that.

So you're essentially admitting that this is about revenge because Germany cares about its citizen's privacy and due process.

I'm saying that if Europe decides it wants to block off parts of its economy, the US would be perfectly justified in doing the same (to everyone's detriment).

I could imagine a US based law that banned the sale of any durable goods produced by a company headquartered in a country that still got more than 5% of its power from lignite coal due to a strong climate commitment. That's tailored basically only to impact Germany. Is that fair?

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