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Comment by withinboredom | Hacker News Reader

Such a US-centric way of thinking. Not every country is as sue-happy as the US.

What absolute nonsense.

This is a list of countries just off the top of my head that has sued Google in the last decade:

    United States
    European Union (which consists of multiple member states)
    Australia
    France
    Germany
    Italy
    Spain
    Russia
    India
    Brazil
    South Korea
    Turkey
    Canada

My current country isn't on that list. Obviously, you're missing well over a hundred countries on that list.

Goal posts: moved

In today’s episode of “people from countries that create nothing whining about not having access to other countries’ technologies”…

I suspect you like watching DVDs and using your Bluetooth headphones while connected to your WiFi?

The members of the EU are countries, not states (& the EU itself is a political/economic alliance, not a country).

"State" in this context is the same as the state in "head of state," AKA "a nation or territory considered as an organized political community under one government." Other examples of this usage are "nation-state" and "city-state."

It is common to refer to the members of the EU as "member states."

So then why not just refer to the whole list as states rather than countries ? IMO it be weird to do so, but at least consistent.

I'm curious what state you're from where it's normal to refer to EU members as "member states" ? USA perhaps ?

Of course they know that. How dumb would one have to be to not know France, Italy, Germany are countries? :-)

So then why not refer to them as countries - that's how they would refer to themselves (I'm ex-UK myself). Doesn't make any sense to say "I know they're countries but I'm just gonna call them states instead". The EU context doesn't make any difference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union

> The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of 27 member states that are located primarily in Europe.

"State" made perfect sense in context of the post.

"State" refers to "any sovereign polity". The US is weird here in that it pretends it's internal political divisions are sovereigns and refers to them as states, but that doesn't make every other country in the world not a state.

Definition from wikitionary (but nothing is special about this choice of dictionary, you should find a similar definition in any dictionary): https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/state#Noun

It's not only past incidents. At some point you've had enough trouble that you shift your stance from "we don't know about any issues in that region" to "we haven't gone through our approval process with legal for that region".

lol dude, Google is being sued in like a dozen countries https://qz.com/google-is-in-a-world-of-trouble-from-governme... (and this article is from last year)

And for very good reasons.

The way to avoid lawsuits in civilized countries is to avoid breaking the laws east and west.

Start with the GDPR:

There is no competent lawyer that doesn't understand the basics of GDPR, there are only companies that are testing if they can get away by playing dumb.

Avoiding breaking the law, here, means not allowing users in those countries to use services.

That, or adjusting their business model in those regions so that pervasive surveillance and privacy invasion aren't their core product. Apparently that's so hard that GDPR detractors can't even acknowledge it as a possibility! Honestly, I see it as a red flag that someone is arguing in bad faith.

Google isn’t worried about individuals suing them, they’re worried about governments or entities like the EU fining them

The billions of dollars in fines that EU countries have levied against Google for various complaints in the past decade or so indicate the opposite.

Big companies would love to know what countries that they will never get sued and deal all shady stuff there, does it exist?

"shady stuff" like relying on users to be able to use their browsers cookie settings.

But many are anti US tech regulatory happy.

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