Twitter’s plea against India government dismissed
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
This idea that this amazing connected information space could be possible is under threat. By illiberal and/or partisan people who happen to have power.
If people are connecting to my servers in my country, it doesn't seem clear to me that this far off place has any jurisdictional rights. Your people left you nation & came to me. If I start to setup offices & run TV ads in your nation that changes the relationship. But conversely, it's absurd & illegitimate that countries like India force me to have an office there, as a cheap sneaky shitty hack to force jurisdictional control.
I also regularly wish things were better in this or that country, including my own. But you and I are entitled to have this bar-level talk about politics after work, while having a beer.
A giant corporation is not entitled to trample over the rule of law in any country, even if that rule is corrupt, inferior, imperfect, unfair, or whatever other qualifications we may subjectively apply to it.
Even though in many cases there's literally no servers, no offices, no business in a country. Or worse, you have India, which just mandates you do have an office, which is an unbelievably bullshit way to get their sneaky talons into the entire rest of the world's business.
Nation's need a limit to jurisdiction. They are not respecting that on the internet, their people are travelling abroad. Until nation's can start to recognize some limit to sovereignty, there is no moral or ethical obligation to fulfill their limitless absurd egotistical power-mongering. It is good that we ignore this illegitimate unjust application of power.
But to repeat, many companies do have real legitemate business operations & physical presences in other countries. Then you do have to obey those laws.
Your obey-all-laws maximalism doesn't acknowledge any limit, & poses a stark picture of absolute lawfulness. How do we navigate conflict between nations; what happens when one countries data protection laws conflict with another countries surveillance laws? What happens when either a nation or a jurisdiction goes power mad & demands basically unfettered access? In general I don't see any reason why we would obey the laws of countries that we don't have a presence in. Your people are coming to us, your people have left your nation. If I go visit Italy I am under their jurisdiction. What's happening now is a farce, this idea that each nation has jurisdiction over the entire internet. It's just not so. There is no internet like that. The lowest-common-denominator of agreeable rights & permissions to exist & host yourself online is the null-set.
It's natural that you don't want a rocket in your airspace, even if it wasn't launched from your land.
The solution is probably a consortium of all countries that participate in Internet, for some baseline rules and laws that all countries equally abide to. But for this to happen we have a lot of social evolution to go through.
Say we still have wars in this world. If we're willing to kill each other and take each other's land and assets, we have zero hope over having uniform opinion about the Internet.