Rumble turns off access in Brazil because of government's censorship demands

https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-...

They definitely straddle the line, but no court has judged them as Nazi yet. There were however other parties, like ANS, NO and FAP (amazing name) that were banned in Germany because of that. Perhaps that's why AfD has wised up.

- Joseph Goebbels

In this scenario, the foreign investor is in a sense creating a legal "proxy person" — a virtual citizen of the country where the exchange exists. The foreign investor is then telling the proxy person to do the trades for them. If the pretend proxy person breaks the law, the real investor gets in trouble... but in ways that are more similar to the ways corporations get in trouble, than the ways citizens of the country get in trouble.

(And some countries don't even allow the creation of these pretend proxy persons; instead requiring you to employ, and hand your money over to, a real proxy person, who will face the domestic legal consequences for executing your trades! This is how e.g. Bahamian shell corporations work; it's also how foreign real-estate investments work in the Philippines. It's never a good time.)

"The purchaser representing themselves legally in the country they're buying from" is also how the aforementioned import arrangements work. The importer registers an export company in the source country — essentially a proxy-person, though in the shape of a corporation — and the export company is what buys the goods and sends them to the import company.

Most trade isn't like this, though, because most trade isn't between legal peers (like an exchange and an investor — both basically "typed as" corporations for the sake of the trade, even if one is a sole proprietor); but instead is between one large company and a potentially-huge number of individually-legally-naive individual consumers.

It is impractical to ask all the people who want to buy a product, to create a foreign trading presence for themselves in the country of origin of that product, as if they were a professional importer. Governments don't want to maintain — or especially to validate and audit — huge databases of hundreds of millions of foreign individuals trading locally. Banks don't want to have to open and maintain hundreds of millions of tiny, individual, unprofitable(!) foreign-deposit accounts for those individuals to use to operate legally in the country.

So instead, governments and banks choose the far simpler route: making the foreign corporations register themselves in the markets they operate in. There are far fewer corporations to keep on the books for both the governments and the banks; and it's far easier to manage their accounts (because corporations are on average more competent at that kind of thing; because unlike individuals, corporations can afford to pay ~hundreds-of-dollar levies to maintain the systems tracking them and keep the bank-accounts revenue-positive for the banks; and because corporations will coalesce bank transfers, turning billions of little daily transactions to individuals' foreign-deposit accounts, into just a few daily transactions to each corporate foreign-deposit account.)

Ignoring the pragmatics, though, there's also a key distinction even in theory: when a company X from country A, trades with consumers in country B, company X is seeking to pull money out of (or put money into) a credit card or bank account that exists in country B (and which is denominated in the currency of country B), and move that money to/from country A, where it will then get exchanged for the currency of country A and drop into the company's country-A bank account.

The manipulation of the country-B bank account, can only legally be done (for most values of country-B) by a company legally registered in country-B to operate on the payment networks of country-B. There has to be a payment server sitting there physically in country-B, connected by dedicated line to the inter-bank network the banks of country-B use; and that payment server has to have signing certs installed to emit messages on the line that will be accepted by the network — signing certs which required a bunch of legal and contractual and trust-handshake hoops to be jumped with the banks of country-B before they'd be issued.

So these are the only options for getting access to such a payment server. Either:

- company X forms a country-B subsidiary XB, that goes through the process of applying for the certs and setting up the payment server; or

- company X pays existing country-B-local payments company Y to use their payments server to do the money-moving-around for them; or

- company X pays multinational payments company Z to provide them a country-agnostic interface for moving money around; when requested by X to perform a country-B transaction, Z will then either signal the servers of their existing country-B-local subsidiary ZB — or will pass the message to their country-B-transaction-partner Y — to do the real money-moving around.

Anything that seemingly doesn't have one of these three fundamental shapes — but which still results in a company in country-A moving around money in a country-B bank account — is just window-dressing on top of underlying infrastructure that does have one of these shapes.

This happens all the time in every country.

Also, they don’t need a firewall, ISPs can block domain names (which the courts can force them to since they operate in the country) very easily and is used across the world.

sounds scarier than 4chan

You're saying the entirety of moral philosophy has no meaning so people should just do whatever they feels like, that's a pretty barbaric position.

>So I default to appeals to utility

Utility also relies on a philosophical justification; if you throw out all philosophy, you also throw out utilitarianism.

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

Coercion is naturally occurring. The aspiration is to understand an objective set of ethics that all people, when only considering power over themselves and not power over others, would agree to. There's a reason it was called the enlightenment, it was always about seeing how things should be, not how things are.

It is without a doubt true that land is a natural commons. Yet in order to make the most efficient use of it it has to be managed privately. When I walk across a field, I am not an aggressor, it is the man who erected the fence around it that is the aggressor. Yet without that fence nobody has any incentive to do anything useful with it. I suppose this emerges from the fact that might makes right and anyone with the capability of taking land without consequence will do so. But we are here to determine what is right, not what is simply true. This one is a difficult problem indeed.

As far as intellectual property, I don't think you can own information. Nobody truly does, we create this abstract framework to try to make it so but it is fundamentally impossible to simultaneously own information and make it useful in the world and ultimately everyone knows this. To truly own information you have to keep it to yourself, but keeping it to yourself is mostly useless. A machine necessarily contains the information on its design in it's entirety, to put the machine into the world is to tell the world how to build it.

- It must be something any human can exercise in the absence of outside interference by other humans;

- Any such interference must be presumptively immoral.

Freedom of expression meets both the empirical and moral requirements for being a natural right.

Brazilian Law doesn't preclude you from having actual intellectual discussions about any topic. There are limits to hate speech, harassment, bullying, etc. There is no real benefit from having bigots spew hatred openly in society. In fact, giving them the opportunity to promote intolerance tends to breed more intolerance. This has been the case with nazis, QAnon, extreme right more generally in the US, Bolsominions in Brazil... We cannot be tolerant of intolerance. Curtailing speech is a "necessary harm" to prevent a bigger harm from occurring, which is the curtailment of life.

> This is not a cogent argument; The vast majority of discrimination is not verbal, in fact the verbal bit isn't generally discrimination at all but a signal that discrimination may be happening.. suppress the signal and you can generally keep the discrimination.

I appreciate the discussion but unfortunately that's not logical. Specifically, I said:

1. All forms of discrimination are harmful and should be minimized or eliminated.

2. Verbal discrimination is a form of discrimination.

3. Therefore, verbal discrimination should be minimized or eliminated.

You're saying

1. The majority of discrimination is non-verbal.

2. Verbal discrimination often signals non-verbal discrimination.

3. If a form of discrimination is less prevalent or is a signal of another form, it is less important to address.

4. Therefore, it's acceptable to allow verbal discrimination.

But that's a fallacy. Specifically "false dichotomy", in that it implies that addressing one issue (verbal discrimination) precludes or is less important than addressing another (non-verbal discrimination). In reality, both can and should be addressed concurrently.

All forms of discrimination, whether prevalent or indicative, contribute to the overall harm caused by discrimination.

Therefore, even if verbal discrimination is less prevalent or a signal of non-verbal discrimination, it should still be minimized or eliminated alongside other forms of discrimination.

You are specifically arguing that we must allow verbal discrimination because we will be able to combat non-verbal discrimination better. I think the burden of proof is on you to prove that this is the case.

Empirically, Brazil is much less racist than the U.S. for a variety of reasons. If freedom of speech was so important to prevent non-verbal discrimination, it would stand to reason that one such example of a "infinitely free speaking" and "tolerant" society would exist. I can't think of any.

Not to mention the fact that "non-verbal discrimination" is specifically harder to legislate against (or even harder to prove in a courtroom), which explains why it is not as clearly outlawed in the Brazilian constitution.

The Wikipedia article on freedom of speech in Brazil is a good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_Brazil

It's not a particularly well-written article, but it does lay out the key article from the constitution (article 5) and the various articles in the penal code and the anti-racism law (which is a specific law!) regarding freedom of speech.

Additionally, Article 3, paragraph 4 of the Constitution is key. It's placement at the very top of the constitution, if not legally meaningful, feels politically meaningful to me:

Art. 3 The fundamental objectives of the Federative Republic of Brazil are:

I. to build a free, just and unified society;

II. to guarantee national development;

III. to eradicate poverty and substandard living conditions and to reduce social and regional inequalities;

IV. to promote the well-being of all, without prejudice as to origin, race, sex, color, age and any other forms of discrimination.

So the proof of the pudding to me as a layman is whether whatever form of speech you used qualifies as "prejudice as to origin, race, sex, color, age and any other forms of discrimination"

Another judge decides when you see the judge that will try your case.

> Do I just sit quietly in jail until then?

No, you can have your attorney file an habeas corpus to either have your case tried speedily or have you be released from jail until the court date.

Just because you don't know how the law works doesn't mean others haven't thought about these challenges before and solved them. Ignorance doesn't make your arguments stronger.