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Comment by momonotoro | Hacker News Reader

Ever been to China? The internet certainly has borders and boundaries. Sometimes you can sneak across or get a visa, but individual nations make their own rules. Most people either follow them or remain unaware of them, and large multinational companies will typically follow local laws because they are juicy targets.

In the UK, companies which protest this law are threatening to leave the market. That would mean blocking UK users on their properties, not helping them find ways to break the law.

Or, when you say "no boarders," do you mean that the internet is not zoned for residential use? Sorry if I misunderstood.

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"and it'd be impossible to impose any without the kind of extreme restrictions of a totalitarian regime."

Surely china would fall under that statement from OP's perspective.

If the UK implemented something like The Great Firewall of China, it would be a gigantic statement about the country's future ideological direction (arguably started and in line with Brexit), and may actually be enough to cause protests large enough to make a difference.

We're not allowed to protest.

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/uk-government-plan...

"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them..."

UK rebelling against the UK itself would be a nice (and IMHO, deserved) end to the empire.

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels ... upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"

>arguably started and in line with Brexit

I disagree with this part. The EU is on that same path. The EU Great Firewall idea has been kicked around for years and it has even shown up in some policy suggestion documents.

I disagree for the simple reason that I've lived in the UK for 40 years, and I recall each home secretary being more authoritarian and pro-surveillance than the last. The RIP bill is a decade old and was strengthened, under home sec May, before the referendum.

I would describe the EU as wavering. Perhaps they'll do it, but it's far from certain.

The EU did implement snooping on every European's internet history in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive

But you could make the argument that it was largely due to Britain.

100% correct - the EU is a relative bastion of sanity in comparison.

It would be nice if the UK government used the ridiculous powers they gave themselves to hold Boris Johnson to account though.

I think the EU started down the path all on it's own. Fining someone who has google fonts is a bit over the top.

Well over a million ordinary people protested against the Second Gulf War and it may zero difference.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/feb/15/politics.politica...

We're British. Our protests either don't matter or are banned.

Perhaps you meant another democratic country where the idiot clowns hadn't taken over the circus ...

Don’t give our idiot Government any ideas.

The UK doesn't need to implement a Great Firewall; if they succeed in convincing service providers to voluntarily exit the UK market, then each service provider will block traffic to/from the UK on its own. A few shitty laws may be enough to incentivize the emergence of a Great Patchwork Firewall.

Protests? I would leave the country. I'm already disillusioned as it is.

To go where?

Serious question as a UK citizen who doesn’t live there anymore. Post-Brexit, leaving is surprisingly difficult despite the refrain of the morons who say “if you don’t like it go somewhere else”, blind or ignorant to the fact they removed that option.

You can always go to Ireland, curtsy of the so-called CTA.

Good point, I’d forgotten about that. Probably one of the easier and better options.

Brexit is a refusal of authoritarianism and introducing another layer of "barely elected" government, which is why the UK is being punished for following through with Brexit.

Of course most governments in the UK, like everywhere else (whether right or left wing) are, more or less secretly, authoritarian so they will be favourable to a great firewall when the right time comes.

The EU has been talking about it for some time and I'm sure they'll stick it together with some 600 pages policy nobody will bother reading at some point. https://diginomica.com/eu-policy-doc-recommends-building-eur...

They can't remove all our freedoms at once or people may lift their heads from their smartphones and protest.

We're being slowly boiled alive.

I spent a long time rebutting each counterfactual in turn, but then I recognised that I was falling for a gish gallop. Furthermore, as dang is (rightly) adamant about avoiding personal remarks, I had to cut out the funny bits.

So instead, here's the simple truth.

The UK, in a surge of authoritarianism, cut its own balls off by leaving the EU (and the Civil rights it confers). It did this to appease fringe nutjobs and to make a pile of money for hedgies. Then it howled in pain and blamed the EU, even though the EU was against the chopping of the plums from the get-go.

The conditions for this bollockectomy were created by a barely-elected government, after the fall of which we have had, mainly, unelected government.

This entire manoeuvre was done under a screed of fractal dishonesty, in which scuttling little fibs decorate a structure of brassy falsehoods all stacked higgledy-piggledy on a giant whopper. Unwilling to accept the blame, the responsible parties continue to lie to this day.

In a parallel move completely unrelated to the above, the unelected UK government is ramping up surveillance. The EU has not done this, but the liars blame it anyway.

Today I learned the phrase “gish gallop”, which is both really useful and really fun to say.

The UK is not being "punished". All the consequences of Brexit are imposed by the UK on the UK. (Also, it seems to be leading them somewhere more authoritarian, not less.)

Brexit for most people was about almost nothing at all. It was an empty shell of an idea that people poured their vision of a better country into. That's why the UK is being 'punished' - because nobody had a single actual decent idea of what they wanted.

> introducing another layer of "barely elected" government

If the UK really cared about unelected government, why don't they get rid of their House of Lords? This would have been much less painful than Brexit. It looks a lot like this unelected government complaint is just an excuse and not something that they actually care about.

I don't think they care about unelected government - a relative novelty in historical terms - so much as being ruled by foreigners.

I’m not on-side with Brexit, but it’s not like the UK public have been given the chance to vote on dissolving the lords at this point.

That's the kind of opportunity which must be seized, not received. The French figured this out but the British probably never will.

Bloody revolution is not really appropriate here, the majority of the House of Lords is already not hereditary - of 780 seats, 90 are occupied by hereditary peers and AFAICT they will no longer pass their seats on.

The issue is whether the leaders of the commons should be able to appoint people to the upper chamber for life, whether the church should have a seat at the table etc. Or whether the upper chamber should be directly elected. It’s a matter of governance and constitution more than embedded privilege.

So as much as “Guillotine the nobs” would be a popular cry, most of them aren’t nobs in the first place.

This kind of cope is why you'll continue to be stuck with them.

I don’t live there, and explaining the situation, which you clearly don’t understand, is not ‘cope’.

I am confident that you have accurately conveyed the British mentality towards their circumstance, and therefore the reason their circumstance will continue.

I am confident you don’t understand what their circumstance is, such that your comments comparing it to the French situation a couple of centuries ago are born from nothing more than ignorance.

Hmm...

French Revolution - 1789.

English Revolution - 1649.

So the English cut off their Monarch's head before the French did. But we then invited the Monarch's back after not liking the republic of the "Lord Protector".

Admittedly the English state, not the later British state, but anyway...

"Brexit" the movement has lots of meanings to lots of people but is generally a set of issues/complaints. The people that movement enabled (brexiteers) have almost universally made those issues worse.

The internet most in China have access to is best viewed as a national intranet.

> That would mean blocking UK users on their properties, not helping them find ways to break the law.

That's a sad reflection of the tech industry. Too much "we can't make money from them" and too little spitefulness of the sovereignty of foreign governments.

The borders and boundaries are bypassed with a roaming SIM card.

Cell towers operate from within the country though and are subject to their laws. That we can bypass things as foreigners is only at the government prerogative.

Correct, however the fact that this situation exists at all I feel is oft overlooked. The implications of it can be debated but the fact remains.

I already block EU countries from my site. Wrote a gem called "GDPR safe" and it returns an http error code 457, if the IP address indicates an EU country.

Thank you. If only Meta would take this approach everywhere and not just Threads, society would be better off.

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