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Comment by maxilevi | Hacker News Reader

“Bard is not available in your country”

Why do they even limit access depending on the country? It’s a chatbot, not a financial service.

Possible actual reason: Google understands US law very well and decided this was a reasonable sweet spot to maximize publicity and use, minimize legal risk. With new tech, it’s hard to know what regional regs could be violated. Countries with stronger data regulation regimes are higher risk to launch anything in.

It’s one of the costs to better privacy controls. You’re not going to get the latest hotness because teams have to think through the risks.

Very weak posture on google. I'm starting to believe behind the scenes stories about it.

"After years of cautious development" Google makes another very cautious step towards a product release.

I can't imagine why even their waitlist itself needs to be geo capped completely, just let us join, release it to some US users first then sign me up when it's ready globally.

Probably some crazy legal thing, like perhaps you can get it to spit out an ITAR restricted passage of encryption code.

Yeah but other systems are more open. Undoubtedly it is about legal risk management - yet goog should have gotten its lawyers to draft whatever global TOS they needed to protect themselves up front. This has enough visibility and they had the lead time.

I expect this kind of regional lock from Microsoft, not Google. What is going on?

Uh, Google frequently only released products for the US market, e.g. Google Home, Google Voice, Chromecast, and others were released US only (sometimes for over a year before available outside of the US).

Chromecast is physical product, so it would be limited if they don't want to pay international shipping charges. Google voice gives you country number, so it would be limited. Google home does make sense as it could only work with partners so if they launch in other countries without partner, it could mean bad reputation.

Here it is just a site with nothing related to region.

C'mon, we're not talking about some startup here. Google is a global mega-corp, if they really wanted they could launch every single product globally, no matter if physical or not.

At this point, I'd flip whatever mental models you have for how 2010-era Microsoft and Google operate.

It also shows this in Canada, sigh

AI queries are way more computationally intensive than traditional searches.

Bard is probably not optimized and would completely overload the hardware Google has available for it should it be released worldwide.

That just shows how far ahead Microsoft is on that one.

You'd imagine that we would have move on from this by this time but no. Also not available in my country. :')

I find it silly for everything outside financial and legal services. It’s usually trivial to get around though.

Of course it’s silly but now there are data privacy laws everywhere that prevent a large company that makes money from just pressing “international release” and forgetting about it. Seriously.

How about taking privacy seriously everywhere and pressing ‘international release’ always because you can?

Well sure, but I'm talking about country-specific laws. Like in Canada you have to follow some strict rules requiring you to inform users about how your software updates itself and receive consent to update at registration time. In China the laws about sending automated SMS are more strict. GDPR considers IPs PII when the rest of the world generally does not. CCPA requires statements about how you use consumer data to be present during registration. And so on.

Basically, different jurisdictions recognize different individual data and privacy rights. Sometimes the requirements even conflict. It's not obvious that there is some universal way to treat data that is acceptable by all, nor what it would be if it did exist. Cookie banners are an example of this going horribly wrong. EU wants to "protect people" online so they require websites to ask consent to use cookies when every browser already allows users to configure cookie policy defaults and on a per-site basis in the settings. Everyone interpreted GDPR as some big movement towards user privacy and adopted cookie consent banners for all users as the "right thing" and the world is worse for it. EU is backpedaling on the banners. Multiple browsers offer features that block them outright.

You get the point.

AI is currently regulated by US export law

In that case, is OpenAI ChatGPT available to parent commenter or not?

Even OpenAI's site (and all of its services) cannot be accessed from certain countries. Funnily enough, BingChat is accessible.

It is, I even have ChatGPT Plus

So then it is probably not an US export laws issue

Or it’s technically illegal.

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